Time to Take Stock

Close your eyes and notice where you feel the breathing as you breathe in, as you breathe out. Place your attention there and then try to stay there. See how long you can stay, how many breaths you can stay. The more you can stay and relax into the breath, the greater the sense of ease and the greater the impact this is going to have on your mind. If you look at the breath a little bit and wander off, come back, look a little bit, wander off, it doesn’t have much impact. You want to stay because that requires some skills: mindfulness, alertness, ardency. These things get developed as you learn how to stay.

At the same time, you have to reflect on what you’re doing. If you’re getting good results, okay, keep it up. If the results are not good, you’re going to have to change—because the change has to come from within. Everything that you need to know, need to study is right here. It’s just a matter of committing yourself and then reflecting on it.

This is the time of year when we reflect on the past year. We take stock of the things we’ve done and the results we’ve gotten. This is the value of having a new year. It’s a convention. You could begin the year any time. In Thailand they begin the year four times: January 1st, then Chinese New Year, then the traditional Thai New Year, and then, finally, Songkran. You get four chances to start the new year right. Here in the West, we have one chance. So make the most of it.

It is a convention. When the sun comes up tomorrow morning, it’s not going to say, “2025” or “2568,” which is the year of the Buddhist calendar. It comes up as normal every other day. But we make it a special day by saying, “This is when the new year begins.” Then we can get some use out of the convention by looking back at the past year: think about the things we did that were good and things that were not so good; things that made us genuinely happy; things that made us happy only for a little bit; and the things we did that didn’t make us happy at all. We’ve got to learn from those things.

After all, this is how the Buddha gained awakening. He learned from his mistakes. It wasn’t that he was perfect all the way from the beginning. He made many mistakes before he finally found the true path. It was basically by reflecting on what he had done, and seeing where it was not up to his standards, and then reflecting on what he might do to change: That’s how he became Buddha.

We can become better people, too, by doing the same thing. Reflect on the past year. What were the things that you did that were really good, and you felt really good about them afterwards for a long time? Try to do more of those. The things you did that you thought were going to make you happy but didn’t make you happy: Remember those so that you don’t make the same mistake again. Then look back and see where your strong points are, where your weak points are—what you can do to use your strong points in order to strengthen your weak points so that your goodness is good all around. We have the practice of virtue; we have the practice of generosity; we have the practice of meditation. Ask yourself: In which areas are you strong? Which areas are you weak? If you find that you’re weak in any of those areas, strengthen them.

So try to make use of this convention that we have that today is the last day of the old year—time to look back. Then tomorrow we can start the new year with some clear ideas of how we want to improve our lives. If we simply let time pass, think that things will get better with time—when we’re young that happens: We get bigger, we get stronger, we get smarter. But there comes a point where things begin to reverse. We have to learn how to compensate for that by making sure that we reflect carefully on what we’re doing, making up our minds to do only the things that are really good. That way, even though the body wears down, the mind doesn’t have to wear down. The mind gets better and better all the time. That’s because you’ve stopped and taken stock. Then you act on what you’ve seen.