For each of us, there will come a day when we pass away from this life to something else. What that "something else" may be, we cannot know for certain. For Christians, it is another and a better life -- at least, so they hope. Buddhists and Hindus hope for the very opposite -- relief at last from the Wheel of Life. Some of us who are desperate may simply be looking for a cessation of our suffering in this life.

Most religious movements begin after a period of time to suffer from an undue focus on what is to come and a corresponding lack of focus on what we can do today to prepare for it. An instructive exercise to counter this tendency is to comb the New Testament (to take one example), looking only for specific directions as to how to live today. If we do this, we'll find no mention at all of the "life to come" or indeed any idea of protecting ourselves against tomorrow. Indeed, in their impracticality, those directions are likely to remind us more than anything else of the recommendations on Steps 10, 11 and 12 in Program literature.

And yet these recommendations are practical. They offer the only method possible for dealing, not only with today, but for that day when we will leave home and never return. In fact, the Buddhists practice their equivalent of the last three Steps quite deliberately as a reminder of death, as a means of enabling themselves to live meaningfully and contentedly with its reality.

As the well-known Program prayer has it:

Today, well lived,
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day.