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Lost opportunities never return…it may take a lifetime journey to believe this fully. The words are simple enough to understand on their own, but do we really accept it as reality?
It was only when I connected this saying to my understanding and accepting the Buddhist teaching on impermanence that this saying hit home - like a brick. The concept of ‘now’ changes after accepting this truth. If you think about it, how do we pinpoint a measure of time where nothing changes? Does ‘now’ even exist or is the word another illusion we create for communication and then accept as a real concept?
We understand change on the large macro scale of things like years, decades, centuries, millennia, epochs and eons. We even sing songs like ‘Those were the days…” or say “It was different before Covid-19 when we could….”
What about change on the small micro level? It is hard, if not impossible, to think of change on the smallest spans of time as real change. Most of us aren’t even aware there are words to measure time less than the fractions of seconds we see on clocks at the Olympic Games. We have a nanosecond, a yoctosecond and it seems someone coined a theoretical Plank time as the shortest measurement of time. I have enough trouble with a split second let alone getting into splitting a second into seemingly endless zeros following the decimal point.
In the mid-90s my mother and I traveled to Asia with a planned stop in NE India when a report of a bubonic plague outbreak in SW India was reported. At the breakfast table, in Tokyo, we had to decide to bypass India or take the chance. That was when my mother said “lost opportunities never return.” She had firsthand knowledge of lost opportunities. She survived the Genocide, crushing poverty and hunger as a child refugee, an adolescence of being an indentured servant, twice and finally landing in an America in deep economic depression. We went to India.
Sometimes life doesn’t feel as if it is giving us any opportunities. If you attended the March 20th Shin Buddhist Service you would have heard the talk on The Way of the Bodhisattva Chapter 6. Verse 108 states “With our joint effort, he offending, I forgiving, I will obtain the fruit of patience. I will first give of this fruit to him, for he is the source of my patience.” This speaks to harm coming to us and the opportunity it provides us, as teacher, opportunities we use, or not.
The teachings of the Buddha, based on awakening to the reality of this world, give us the tools to take the opportunity of each moment to at least reduce our unhappiness or dissatisfaction and turn it into greater peace for our self. The choice is ours.
Namo Amida Butsu.
In Gassho,
Rev. Anita
rev.anita.cbt@outlook.com
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