Heedfulness

As the Buddha said, the root of all skillfulness in the mind is heedfulness, realizing that your actions do make a difference, and that difference can be good or bad. So you have to be careful about what you do, what you say, what you think. Think about what you want to do and then compare it to the Buddha’s standards of what should be done. That, he said, is one of his duties as a teacher: to give you a sense of what should and shouldn’t be done. In some cases, he’ll lay them out as precepts, the things you should avoid doing. In other cases, he gives you standards, ideals, which means that you have to figure out how to apply the ideal in your life right now. And heedfulness is one of those ideals.

You think about your actions, realizing that you don’t have much time. You can live to a hundred years, but that still feels like a short time at the end of a hundred years. What’s left? It’s all gone, gone, gone—and what do you have left to show for it? Well, you have your karma. You have the actions that you’ve done, the qualities that you’ve built into the mind. Those will be your treasures.

So if you’ve been building in your mind attitudes of disrespect, carelessness, apathy, those are the things you’ll take with you. Those are not good things to have with you because they’ll weigh you down. But if you’re respectful, if you’re heedful, mindful—have a very strong sense of what really is important in your life and that you go ahead and you do it—then there won’t be any regrets when you have to go because the time you’ve spent is well spent. It’s gone, but it leaves good things behind.

So as you go through the day, ask yourself, “This thing that I’m doing right now, is it going to be for my long-term welfare and happiness or not?” If it’s not, ask yourself, “Why am I doing it?” You want to think of your time as an investment. Invest in it well. And the rewards will come. They keep on coming if you invest really well. As the Buddha said, there is such a thing as long-term welfare and happiness.

Sometimes you hear that the Buddha says life is like the waves on the shore: They come and they go, and they come and they go, and you can’t hold on to anything. But some things come and they stay for a long while. So you want the good things to come and stay, and you want the bad things—if they’re going to come—to come and go right away. That requires that you stay with good things in your mind, in your thoughts, in your words, in your deeds, realizing that the time you have is a gift from your own past karma that allowed you to become a human being. So you want to reinvest it well.