LOL, Buddha

My note-taking app saw me a little too clearly the morning my dad died.

My dad died at 5:44am. The hospice nurse called with the news. I made coffee, opened my journal, and my note-taking app handed me a Buddha quote about peace and freedom from resentment.

Reader, you can not make this shit up.

The Setup, For The Uninitiated

Obsidian is a note-taking app that nerds like me use to build elaborate second brains we will never fully use. I have a daily journal template — the kind of productivity-bro setup any therapist would gently raise an eyebrow at — and one of the modules at the top automatically pulls a quote from a corpus of inspirational nonsense.

Some mornings it’s Aristotle on happiness. (May 5th. The algorithm’s favorite intern.) Some mornings it’s Wayne Dyer telling me to stretch my mind. (May 1st. Always Wayne.) May 2nd was some guy named John Simone, on how bad situations change. They’ve been showing up at the top of every morning page for months — Pearl Buck, Maya Angelou, an Aristotle rerun, a Lao Tzu — like a very mild Greek chorus that thinks I should drink more water.

And then, on May 6th, this:

To be clear, did the quote inside Obsidian look this fancy? Absolutely not. But look, I had this image asset generated and just WORK WITH ME, ALRIGHT?

My dad had been gone for less than two hours.

The Ceiling Look

You know that thing where something so absurd happens that you actually, physically, look up at the ceiling? Like maybe there’s a hidden camera, or a director somewhere, or a guy with a clipboard taking notes?

I did that. Coffee in hand, in the kitchen, at six in the morning, staring up at a stucco ceiling like it owed me an explanation.

Buddha? Jesus? Wayne Dyer himself? Was this you? Did one of you hijack the random number generator? Because if so — well done. Tight pacing. Strong dismount. The system that’s been throwing up Pearl Buck and John-Whoever-He-Is at me for months chose this day to land the joke.

The quote didn’t make me feel better, exactly. It didn’t make me feel worse. I just felt… seen. Maybe a little too seen, exposed even. Which begs the question, how does one feel exposed by what was essentially a random number generator and an array of quotes?

The first thing I committed to the permanent record that morning, before texting anyone, was this:

Dad passed away at 5:44am. LOL that Buddha quote was completely by coincidence.

That’s the sentence. Not the funeral home. Not the breath. Not the long, quiet drive over to Fremont Village. A LOL about a Buddha quote — which is, if you are of a certain immigrant-kid disposition, exactly what you’d say to a friend at a bar four hours later, when you’ve already cried in three different places and need someone else to laugh so you don’t have to do it again alone.

The Universe Has No Plot. Algorithms Sometimes Do.

Here’s the thing about productivity systems. We build them to optimize ourselves — to track habits, journal feelings, capture thoughts, flatten our messy interior lives into something dashboard-able. Most days they hum along being mildly useful. They remind you to drink water. They surface a podcast you bookmarked four months ago. They suggest, with the gentle insistence of a low-stakes life coach, that you go on a walk.

They are not built for the day your father dies.

They don’t know to stop. They have no respect for the news, because they don’t have the news. The same Obsidian plugin that pings me to do my morning pages does not consult my texts, or my mother’s voice, or the call from the assisted living facility at 5:47am. It just does its job.

And so on May 6th, the system did exactly what it had been doing every morning for months. It opened a fresh note. It populated the metadata. It pulled a quote.

The randomness was a kind of mercy in disguise — or maybe it was just randomness, and I was the one assigning meaning, because that’s what humans, especially grieving ones, do. (We are pattern-recognition machines that occasionally cry.)

The universe doesn’t have a plot. Algorithms sometimes do, by accident, the way a thousand monkeys at a thousand keyboards will eventually type those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace on the exact morning your father is being moved to a funeral home in El Cerrito.

You don’t really get a choice about whether to laugh.

Still Running

The system has continued to do its thing this week. Today it gave me a Lao Tzu quote about water. Tomorrow it’ll probably be Aristotle again, who is, as established, the algorithm’s favorite intern.

I’m leaving the Buddha quote pinned at the top of the May 6th note. Not because it helped, exactly. Not because I think Buddha was talking to me, specifically, through a JavaScript random selector at 5:44 in the morning. (Though if he was, again — strong work, sir.)

I’m leaving it because the universe doesn’t owe me a punchline, and on the one day it accidentally delivered one, the least I can do is tip my hat.

lol, Buddha. You got me.