Unknown Buddhist

Someone asked a question recently that I haven’t been able to shake.

“Is the clarity you have—the way you hold things—is that the illness teaching you? The Buddhist philosophy? Or just God quietly doing what God does?”

I sat with that for a while. Which, for the record, is one of the few things Parkinson’s has genuinely improved. I sit with things now. Mostly because getting up requires a strategic plan, advance notice, and occasionally a spotter. But the question deserved more than a clever deflection. The honest answer is: I don’t know.

I’ve lived long enough to understand that “I don’t know” is not an admission of failure. It’s usually where the interesting stuff lives.

Let me try all three on for size.

With the “Illness Theory,” there is something about a serious diagnosis that performs a kind of ruthless editorial function on your life. Parkinson’s handed me a red pen and said: Go through everything you think matters and cross out about seventy percent of it. Turns out most of what I was anxious about didn’t survive the edit. Social embarrassments. Professional slights. The long list of things I was going to do “someday.” Gone. Suddenly the column of what actually matters got very short and very clear.

When your body stages a rebellion complete with formal grievances and HR complaints, you stop arguing about the small stuff. You realize your central nervous system has gone on strike, management has completely lost control of the floor, and you simply cannot afford to spend what’s left of your energy on things that don’t deserve it.

But here’s the problem with this theory. Plenty of people get sick and become bitter, terrified, or simply exhausted by the machinery of survival. Illness by itself doesn’t produce clarity. It produces pressure. What you’re made of determines what comes out under that pressure.

So the illness can’t be the whole answer.

Then there is the “Philosophy Theory”—that hybrid of Buddhist practice, Christian heritage, and stubbornly independent spiritual scaffolding I’ve assembled over the years. It gave me a framework before illness. The Five Precepts. Ahimsa. The understanding that impermanence isn’t a tragedy; it’s simply the nature of things. The sand mandala gets swept away. That was always the point.

Meditation helped. Still does. Sitting quietly with what is, rather than negotiating with what isn’t, turns out to be excellent preparation for a body that has strong opinions about what it will and won’t do on any given morning. And yet. I knew the philosophy long before the diagnosis. I’d read the texts, sat in the silence, and understood the concepts. But understanding a thing intellectually and actually living from it are two embarrassingly different experiences. It is remarkably easy to maintain a serene attachment to the concept of impermanence until the pharmacy line moves at the speed of continental drift. The philosophy was the map. Something else made me actually use it.

So the philosophy can’t be the whole answer either.

That leaves the third option: the “God Theory.” The one that is hardest to argue, impossible to prove, and somehow the most stubborn of the three.

Maybe God has simply been doing what God does—quietly, without fanfare, without a press release—which is to take the raw material of a broken-down, opinionated, chronically ill, Parkinson’s-riddled, cancer filled, Amazon-Prime-canceling, 66-year-old and slowly, patiently, make something useful out of it. Not dramatic. Not miraculous in the Hollywood sense. Just the steady, almost imperceptible work of grace operating below the noise level of daily life.

My late friend, Kanako, showed me what love looked like after she passed. And as the illness stripped away what wasn’t essential, Kanako taught that the principles of faith and love is the foundation for what remained. It’s the love that holds me all together. It’s something that I already knew, but God knows way better than I, what I was going to need and when. And I’m not sure that’s not just called ‘God doing God’s job.’

The most honest answer to the original question is probably: all three, and none of them alone, and something underneath all three that I don’t have a clean name for. Which, fittingly, is also a pretty good description of what it feels like to be me on most days. Yes, for the record, my right foot disagrees with all of this. It has essentially declared itself an independent republic and refuses to negotiate with the rest of my leg. But my right foot disagrees with most things lately. But we reached an understanding.

And that understanding is that it’s not one thing, it’s probably all things. And where’s there all things, there’s love. And where there’s love, there’s God. God is the faith, the philosophy and the illness.