Your Diamond Day

Let us suppose that on the day you were born, you were presented with a bucket of perfect and rare diamonds. Even on that first day of your life, you extracted one of these perfect diamonds, but you did not know what it was. Not only did you not know its purpose, you were completely uninterested. All you wanted was mommy, milk, comfort, and care, and with no idea what this diamond meant, you forgot quickly where it went.

The next day, you extracted another perfect diamond, and again, you did not know what it was for; perhaps it fell through your fingers. Each day, you were compelled to extract another diamond from your bucket of diamonds. In your youth, you extracted a diamond, and looking at it, you thought, 'this is boring and ordinary, and does not matter. There is an endless supply of diamonds,' and so you did not give it much importance because there were so many left in your bucket, and so you dropped it in the dust.

Like this, your life went on. One day, you reached into the bucket, and noticed that there were not as many diamonds in there as there were before, but you could not see how many were left. In this way, you began to become concerned and a little bit frightened about the uncertainty of the quantity of these precious diamonds. You were now used to taking them in your hand, handling it for a while, and rather enjoying the feel of it, but now the quantity is going down. One day, perhaps not so long ago, or perhaps yesterday, you reached into that bucket, extracted a diamond, but this time you held it up to the light. You looked at it directly for the very first time, and said, "How beautiful this is. This is a day of my life that will soon be over. I will not waste this day. I will make it meaningful. I will extract every bit of value from this extraordinary gem given to me that I have in the form of time." That was your first diamond day.

Some people, perhaps even someone here, realized that there was not as much time left in lifespan. There was not only an uncertainty about how many days were left, but a certainty that there definitely were not as many days in front of you as there were behind you. Now we can see that the activities we perform today might even be our last. This is an authentic Dharma realization. Those of you who have some skill and spiritual development from previous lives as meditators might have even felt the hair on the back of your neck rise when this happened. You might feel something extraordinary overcoming you combined with anxiety, producing a sense that I will not waste any more time!