(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 24 June 2013, Czech Summer Camp, Srimad Bhagavatam 8.2.33)
Time is moving very fast. In the beginning, it doesn’t seem to be so but at one moment, one realises, “Suddenly I’m old! How did it happen?” Getting old is a strange experience because for a long time, we feel we are not really ageing, “I’m just the same as I always was.” And then suddenly, you’re old and you think, “How did that happen?”
So, it goes like that, very quickly, therefore one must be very careful to utilize his time for making progress. We take shelter of an asrama, whichever asrama we desire and we must follow the codes of that asrama. We must develop our asrama. It’s not just a matter of the colour of the cloth; it is about a code of behaviour and it is about cultivating Krsna consciousness in that situation.
Sometimes household life is compared to a deep dark well in the scripture. So it may be that one is brahmacari or brahmacarini and then feels, “Well, I can’t do this anymore; it’s time to get married.” Some people, when they get married, they go to a deep dark well and they dive-in head down. They think, “Now that I’m changing asrama, I got to really do it – go straight down to the bottom.” But that is not intelligent.
Generally speaking, in these wells – I’ve seen many in India – they usually have also some brackets inside that make a ladder so that some maintenance work can be done. So there is no need to go to the bottom. One can still keep some strong spiritual culture. In fact this is the idea that in the brahmacari or brahmacarini asrama, we are cultivating good spiritual habits and then we maintain them in the householder asrama because after all, we don’t forget the long term goal; we cannot risk that we lose our opportunity for going back to Godhead.