You know, you'll come to a point if you don't die first where 63 Seems pretty young. Oh, would it be 70 again. The Buddha spoke of impermanence and the Chan patriarch spoke of sudden enlightenment. If you do not study Buddha Dharma you will not know impermanence and if you do not cultivate practice you will not know sudden enlightenment. When Shakyamuni Buddha first turned the Dharma Wheel at Deer Park, he taught impermanence. Before entering nirvana, you reminded his disciples that whatever is born must perish. Birth, death and impermanence characterize worldly existence. It's only in the liberation of nirvana that birth and death perish. If you do not practice toward general realization, how can you escape the delusive snares of the demons of impermanence? Every day, in the evening session, we recite bodhisattva Samantabhadra. This warning, the day has passed our lives to our closing, like fish in shallow water, joy will not last. Let us work with pure effort as if our heads were a flame. Be mindful of impermanence. Beware of idleness. I used to have trouble with that phrase work as if your head was on fire. But I've come to understand it as work directly and completely without hesitating, if your head was on fire, you'd put it out in no time at all. told the story before of sitting in a cabin we had down in southern New York, reading a book with the wind door open in the cabin, just an old rustic shack, basically. And our car was parked on the Hill that led up to the door. And unbeknownst to me, my son had gotten in there he was, I don't know five or six years old. And I looked up from my book, and saw the car rolling backwards towards the ravine. Without knowing how I did it, I was at the car throwing the door open, throwing my poor child to the other side of the car. And because he was in the driver's seat, and then stomping on the brake, that brake pedal was huge, filled the sky