“The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute.  What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.”  — CHUANG TZU. 

What we know for sure is that death will come, but what we don’t know for sure is that, when and how we will die.

We don’t know what plan the Divine has for us. Our lives are Impermanence. Impermanence simply means that things are always changing：the world, our body, mind, and spirit; we are not the same as few minutes ago, nor yesterday, nor last week, nor last year. Our body changes, cells die and rebuild; our environment changes, rain or cold weather comes, and we change our plan. Our mind also changes and as we become happy or sad, our brain wave changes as well.

If we live as if we have all the time in the world, and we are living to keep what we have and to make sure they stay the same, then we are deceiving ourselves. What a dilemma! We have this false belief that life will continue, that life is permanence. This makes us a slave to our lives. We try to keep our cars, houses, shoes, clothes, etc. If they change, or disappear, we get upset, we try to fix it back to what it was, etc.

When we were younger, we go to school, get a job, then buy a car, buy a house, get married, have kids, plan for retirement, make sure our business is successful, buy more cars, more houses, and go for more trips. How can life be so monotonous, petty, and repetitive, yet we live in a pursuit of trivial, nothing better. This is what Sogyal Rinpoche calls living in “Active Laziness”. The western laziness is,“It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.”

Now, if someone were to ask you, ”You have one more day to live, what will you do?“ In most cases, most people will remember our love ones and say all that needs to be said. For our daily lives, We should take care of one another rather than fighting with each other. When People need love, it is something we have the ability to offer, but we keep forgetting. As mother Teresa said, “To love, rather be loved“. There would be more joy and peace in our lives when we can be the ”pencil of God“.

We must live each day, knowing that life is impermanence, and we have to live in the moment.

“Yoga chitta vritti nirodahah”

This first Yoga Sutra states, that Yogi is the one who has control over mind waves. It also reminds us to live consciously or be responsible for the time we have, so that if we die tomorrow, we will have no regrets.