You cannot decide your character once and for all. And those who decide their character once for all are dead people. They simply go on following a dead routine; they are not transformed by this dead routine.
Life is a continuous process, a movement — it is a river. You have to adjust yourself according to the situations; otherwise you remain fixed, and life goes on changing all around. The only result will be that a gap arises between you and your life, and that gap creates misery, sorrow.
You are always missing the train. Either you are too early or you are too late, but you are never on the exact point. You are either running ahead or you are lagging behind. You are either in the past or in the future. Some people live in their memories and other people live in their imagination.
And to live rightly means to be in the present, to be exactly in the middle — in the middle of past and future, in the middle of imagination and memory, in the middle of that which is no more and that which is not yet. In that exact middleness is the rightness: samyaktva.
And Buddha applies this to every facet of life, to every aspect.
You can eat too much and then one day you become tired of eating too much; you suffer, your body suffers. Then you start fasting — that is moving to another extreme. Again your body suffers, first from too much food, then from no food at all. When are you going to be exactly in the middle?
And remember, again let me repeat it: the middle is not a fixed point. You cannot decide once and forever that this is the middle, that "I will eat only so much" — because your needs change. One day you have walked ten miles, you may need a little more food. One day you have rested, you have not worked at all, it was a holiday — you will need a little less food.
One day you have been chopping wood; you will need more food, your body needs more nourishment. And one day it was raining and you were simply playing cards; you can do with little food.
And once in a while your body may not need food at all. If you are ill it will be good to give the body complete rest, because eating means work for the body. The body has to digest it, the body has to continuously work on the food. Once in a while it is good; if you are feeling that the body is not in good shape, it is good not to eat. But there is no religious quality about it; this is a very scientific approach.
One thing is certain: that nothing can become a static phenomenon. You have to go on moving.
OSHO