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I work at a church and one time when talking to an older woman with a difficult disease, I said something spontaneously and I immediately thought like "Oh, maybe that was way too far, better brace myself for the incoming slap" but instead she really appreciated it. (I also have lung disease but she didn't know that.)
Here is the convo:
She had said "Sometimes I'm jealous of you, you know, having so much future ahead of you."
My reply was "Maybe I have more future than you, who knows, and you have more past than me, but we have the same amount of 'now'."
God! Why can't I come up with that level of quality of pseudo-Mahayana glurge when I am at the typewriter actually trying to come up with something? It's so weird, it definitively wasn't something I had thought out ahead of time. It just was my spontaneous reply to her comment. But it stuck in my mind obv. Maybe this is how all of thouse glurgy slogans originate, like the "83 problems" (another modern-day, but good, li'l koan) or w/e.
The thought—we have the same amount of "now"—has been a treasure I've returned to again and again. So I'm grateful for having found it.
BTW, now that I think of it, I 100% for sure was influenced by the song lyrics to "Now Is Mine" by K's Choice. "Take my future, past, it's fine—but now is mine." So credit goes to Sam Bettens for writing one of my fave albums growing up, Cocoon Crash.