It is more difficult to be speedy, about anything, when your supply of oxygen is exhausted simply by making a bed. When I had the energy for speed, I wasn't mindful of time. If I was late for an appointment, I might dash out the door, spin the wheels, and get stuck in the driveway. Then I had to dash in for a shovel and a bag of sand. If I left the book I needed upstairs, I would have to make an extra trip for it. After a whole day of this kind of waste, no wonder we feel drained, and just want to lie down and complain about our bad day.

Now imagine that you are unable to dash. One trip up the stairs and you have to sit for a few minutes to pay the oxygen debt. Rushing anywhere, for any reason, leaves you gasping like a fish on a dock. You have to give yourself space and time to recover from the most trivial wasted effort. To get angry about having to move so slow just cranks up more waste. What are you going to do with the anger — throw something? That will make you gasp and pant all the more.

But giving yourself space and time is also giving yourself kindness; no pressure, no speed. Do I really need that trip up the stairs? When I am there, what am I forgetting, what can I take down with me so that I won't have to come back in two minutes? If my car is stuck on the ice, how can I handle it to avoid physical expenditure? Take it easy. Look around.

Sitting calmly and looking around, I notice the lavender ripples of light on the snow in a field, and the stubble of dead weeds coming up through the crust. The snow makes a separate system of rings around each stalk; no two systems are alike, but they all show the direction and patterns of the wind. How important is it that I go anywhere? The light on a group of stones — that is a masterpiece of art, made in the roadside ditch by nobody at all.

Once, when I was stuck in a snowbank, the rear wheels buried up to the bumper, I had to measure each and every shovelful of snow, like an ant moving a mountain, one grain at a time. It was a pleasant surprise to find that, in such a situation, even with a serious lung disease, I was not entirely helpless. There was plenty of time to see the tracks of the car, how they slid into the brook, how I had turned the wheel trying to bounce out of the rut and did not quite have the forward momentum to regain the road. What a precise reflection of my state of mind.

I walked slowly to a house. There was a bag of salt on the porch and a four-wheel-drive truck in the yard. The owner of the truck was doing carpentry upstairs. We talked about carpentry. He was glad to be of service and pulled out my car with a tow chain. The world is full of generosity. By having to ask for help, I tune into that inexhaustible bank of kindness that is all-pervasive and unconditional, and feels so good when it comes through us to someone else. Because of my need, his routine changed; maybe he took another step on the path.

We have little choice about anything, moving around as we do in a sleepy, anxious cloud of habit and conditioned response. When we slow down, that cloud settles, finally, and the details hidden within it begin to emerge with startling precision. I hold the kettle to the faucet; hear the water swirl in the bottom; place it on the stove, the little drops sizzling away from the hot grill; stare out the window at the vortex of snow down in the valley, swirling over the trees. Finally, the steam whistles through the spout and I pour a cup of tea. My thoughts flutter and swirl like water, like the snow. Having to slow down begins to seem less like a disability and more and more like a precious gift.

But I cannot delude myself that this is some kind of accomplishment, for I would dearly love to leap, like my cat, from the stairs to the floor; I would love to dance, run like a horse across the yard, play football, go out for a pass. The fact that slowing down is choiceless becomes part of the gift: taking credit for things just keeps stirring up that cloud. Since I cannot take credit, what really matters is the scent of the tea. The only choice we have anyway is to wake up.

A year before my mother died, she asked me what was wrong with my chest. She was the one person in the world who would want to hear whatever I had to say about it. As I narrated the details, she passed her hand over her face and named an old friend of hers who had died of my ailment. "I hope you don't croak before I do," she said. "It wouldn't be right."

I felt as though at long last I had graduated to her level. The generation gap vanished; I had finally grown up. I had something more serious to reveal to her than mumps and divorce. It was as though I now possessed an admission ticket to some kind of secret society — the society of those who have made friends with Yama, the Lord of Death. We could call this the Order of the Black Monk. The requirement for admission would be terminal or disabling sickness, battle experience, prolonged imprisonment and torture, waiting for execution, or working with the dead and dying on a regular basis. Attempted suicide would not qualify, since this act implies continued attachment to the illusion that you can escape.

While I had health, youth, food, friends, and comforts, I would hear about disasters and think, "I'm glad that did not happen to me." Then I would play the "what-if" game: what if I were trapped in the plane going down; what would I do if I had six months to live; what if I had six minutes? . . . But during this game there was always the separation between me and those who were "less fortunate"; I think that the purpose of the game was to maintain that separation. The initiation rite into the Order of the Black Monk is realizing that you are it; there is no separation anymore; you have been tagged.

In such an order, I am still a mere novice, for my mind remains cluttered with the detritus of hope and fear. But some kind of flip has taken place: from the viewpoint of the Order, hope is irrelevant; fear is fulfilled and consequently dissolved. There is no need to maintain any kind of class system between less and more fortunate, happy and miserable; each experience has its own texture, and absolutely everything is path. If a disease brings this kind of realization, then in what sense does it continue to be "disease"?

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