Getting Our Affairs in Order

Photo: Canva Free stock — Calm Lake near Mountains during Sunrise. Quang Nguyen Vinh / Pexels.

The other day, in a yin yoga class at my favorite studio, Wild Thing, I discovered that I am in excellent shape.

Unfortunately, only from the neck down.

My body is strong, limber, vibrant. As I sank into the poses, I was proud of this old body, still rocking it on the mat.

My mind was having a very different experience.

It was reviewing conversations, compiling grievances, making plans. It had concerns about my schedule and opinions about people who were not in the room. We were barely into the class, and it was already wondering how much longer this would take.

That was when I realized: yin yoga is a gym class for the mind.

And my mind is a chain-smoking, gossipy, complaining old lady in curlers.

She is wildly out of shape.

I could almost see her sitting at the kitchen table, cigarette in hand, explaining what was wrong with everyone. Meanwhile, my body was an exemplary model of fitness.

I laughed at the contrast, and thought about how utterly hilarious; here I am focused on macros and intervals peptides to perfection and my mind is a wildebeest with terrible manners.

I stayed with it. This is the mind I allow to run my life. I consult her first thing in the morning. I listen to her late into the night. I let her tell me what a conversation meant, what might go wrong, whether I have done enough, or worse, am enough.

And there on the mat, with no particular problem to solve, I could feel how evolutionarily terribly adapted her company is.

I could also feel something else: the quiet that is still here, underneath the mind.

The quiet

Recently, I had the privilege of working with a man who was passing away, helping him make some final prayers as he counted down his last days.

Those prayers were full of love and gratitude. Gratitude for the life he had lived. For fifty-something years of love.

There is something about being with a person near the end of life that makes you listen differently. I found myself listening not only to his words, but to what mattered enough to be spoken with the time he had left.

We often call this “getting our affairs in order.”

Usually, we mean the paperwork. The will, the accounts, the arrangements. All the necessary things that help those we leave behind.

But in those prayers, I felt another kind of ordering taking place.

He was tending to the energetic order of his soul.

A life was being gathered in gratitude. Love was being given its rightful place. What might once have occupied whole days of thought could no longer compete with what was most precious.

I have carried that experience with me. And on the yoga mat, listening to my own restless mind, it returned as a question:

Why do we wait until we are dying to put our inner lives in the right order?

The order I am coming to trust is this:

God first. Love second. The mind a distant third.

I can write that easily. Living it asks much more of me.

It asks me to notice when I have reversed the order—when my thoughts are in charge, love is conditional, and God gets whatever attention I have left.

It asks me to recognize how often I let a passing mood govern the way I treat someone. How quickly the desire to be right can crowd out the desire to understand. How much of my life I can spend mentally elsewhere while the people I love are right in front of me.

My mind has gifts. I am grateful for them. But being useful is not the same as being fit to lead.

Small, repeated acts of remembering

What I appreciated about that yin class was that I could not think my way through.

I had to stay present.

Stay with the stretch. Stay with the breath. Stay through the moment when my mind decided we had better things to do.

Sometimes I followed her. I disappeared into a plan or an old conversation. Then I noticed, and came back.

There was nothing glamorous about it. But there was something deeply reassuring in discovering that I could hear the mind without obeying it.

Perhaps this is how we begin putting our affairs in order while we are still alive and well: through small, repeated acts of remembering what comes first.

A moment of prayer before reaching for the phone. The willingness to listen without preparing a rebuttal. The choice to return to love when the mind has assembled an excellent case against it.

I wonder what happens when we practice this together.

When we meet one another with a little less mental noise. When we stop making everyone else responsible for the weather inside our heads. When our intelligence begins to serve something deeper than our individual fears and ambitions.

That is what I mean by a coherent field of consciousness. Not people who agree about everything, or people who have somehow become perfectly calm. People practicing a shared order: God first, love second, mind in service to both.

I believe that is the kind of coherence these times are asking of us.

Beyond the mind

There is so much debate now about whether AI will end humanity.

I understand why people are afraid. I also recognize something familiar in the fear. We humans seem always to be anticipating the end of times, imagining that the edge of the world we know must also be the edge of creation.

I do not believe it is.

My faith is that consciousness and the dance of creation will continue beyond us, beyond the forms we recognize, beyond what our minds can conceive.

But I do believe something is coming to an end.

Perhaps what is about to become extinct is the human mind as we have known it: not our capacity to think, but our conviction that thinking is what we fundamentally are.

AI is, in a sense, digesting our mind—our language, our ideas, our accumulated patterns of thought. And as we watch more of what we once considered uniquely ours appear outside us, we may be forced to confront a question we have long avoided:

Who are we beyond all that thinking?

I believe we are going to learn, once and for all, that we are not the mind.

We are the ones who can notice it. The ones who can hear its complaints and still choose tenderness. The ones who can be moved by love in a way that no argument can fully explain.

That is difficult to accept when the mind has been running the household for so long. Mine certainly does not intend to surrender the keys without a discussion.

But I no longer think the answer is to give her more authority. Or to train her to compete with a machine.

I think the invitation is to discover who I am when the mind grows quiet.

That is why I believe awakening is the medicine for the age of AI. We need to become intimate with the part of us that is not reducible to our thoughts—and learn to live from there.

The man I prayed before his death with was gathering his life in love.

I am still here, with days ahead of me (god willing), a strong body, and a mind that could use a lot of right ordering. That ordering, in my life, starts now. Will you join me?