Just as time is needed  

for a perfume bottle’s fragrance to fade away, 

time is also needed 

for the scent of our habits to wane.

An empty bottle of perfume, even after washing, will still exude its original fragrance. Although the perfume is long since gone, its scent or “habit energy” remains and will need considerable time to dissipate. 

In a similar manner, our bad habits also need time to be eliminated. Even after we curtail an action its habit energy remains, like that scent of the perfume. Lured by the habit energy’s lingering presence, we find it difficult to break the energy’s hold. And so, we are unable to cease the action. 

Consider the countless lifetimes we have spent perpetuating and reinforcing our habits, committing misdeed after misdeed. The time the perfume stays in its bottle is minuscule compared to our time committing misdeeds in samsara. And so, our habit energy will take a long time of diligent hard work to dispel, to finally be extinguished.