Book One ends with a gentle boot to the backside. The Pali idea is appamada — heedfulness, the opposite of coasting on autopilot — and it’s reportedly the last thing the Buddha emphasized. The teacher’s version is warmer but no less urgent: don’t leave this for “someday.”
His reasoning is the oldest one there is, and unanswerable: the deadline is real and it’s unmarked. None of us gets a heads-up. So the plan of “I’ll get serious about my inner life once things settle down” is quietly a plan to never do it — because things don’t settle down, they just rearrange.
Don’t wait until life feels ready — you’ll wait forever. Readiness isn’t out there in your circumstances. Readiness is you, deciding you’re ready.
— his own line, 2007You needn’t believe in rebirth for this to bite. It’s a straight memento mori — the same finite-time logic behind Bezos’s “regret minimization” or the Stoics’ daily glance at mortality. A hard time limit is the best-known cure for “later.”
“When things calm down” is a trap. The window is now, because now is the only window anyone is ever actually issued. Sit today — that’s the end of Book One’s argument.