Modern Minds and Ancient Roots: How to Just Be, Even When Everything’s Moving
Where is my mind today?
Off in some faraway land, I imagine—on some grand magical adventure, perhaps battling monsters or deciphering ancient runes.
If you were to live in such a place, what role would you play? Would that character even remotely resemble the person you are here and now?
And yet, aren’t we always playing roles—shifting, adapting—characters in the games of our own design?
This simple question—Where is my mind today?—has become a quiet ritual I ask myself each morning. It’s not just a mental check-in, but something deeper. A metaphysical one. Am I truly present in this world? Or am I off drifting through another, half-anchored in dreams, memories, or possibilities?
Sitting here in the quiet of my home, the gentle, constant pattering of rain on the roof above, if I let it, I can feel the gravity of it all settle in—the full weight of life’s relentless unfolding. This past week along held its own gravitational force and powerful beauty: brutal tornadoes followed by painfully beautiful spring days. And beyond that? Political headlines at every turn. Earthquakes. Fires, plane crashes. The Aurora stretching across the sky in the southern states, yet again. Celebrities unraveling. Secrets spilling. Ai shape-shifting into something terrifyingly uncanny. Volcanoes erupting. Power outages. Countries teetering. “Aliens” maybe are… maybe not. Ancient civilizations that maybe were. And still, the rain keeps falling.
[makes a fluttery, dismissive hand gesture]
It does no good to dwell too long on that which has already come to pass, or even on that which is currently taking place. That kind of fixation can become a riptide—you get pulled under and out before you realize you’ve lost your footing.
“We sit in the mud my friend, and reach for the stars.”
I've been bouncing between two amazing books these past couple of months that feel strangely comforting—or maybe more like maps of the terrain we’re all navigating. Both were published in the aftermath of the pandemic. One is 432 pages, published in 2022; the other, just 120 pages and published in 2024. Yet both deliver a potent punch in very different ways.
In Journey of the mind, Dr. Ogi Ogas and Dr. Sai Gaddam map out how identity develops over time. They trace the evolutionary roots of consciousness—from the earliest organisms to the complexity of human introspection. It’s a fascinating account of how the “self” is something we grow into, shaped layer by layer over billions of years.
Then there’s When No Thing Works by Norma Wong. Where Ogas and Gaddam build identity, Wong teaches how to undo it. She begins her book with such raw clarity, diving straight into the emotion and spiritual toll of the last decade—acknowledging our cultural burnout, the unraveling of systems, and the disorientation we still carry from the pandemic years. Wong invites us into sillness. Into quiet. Into letting go of the self entirely.
At first they seem like opposites. One building up to and leading to identity—while the other suggests releasing it. But soon, I realized: they converge around the same truth. The “self” is a construct.
One formed through evolution.
The other dissolved through presence.
Both treat identity as fluid and ultimately non-essential to awareness, offering a scientific and spiritual path to move beyond ego.
I didn’t realize how deeply their messages would resonate with the times we’re living in—how they would name, in different languages, what so many of us have been feeling. The disorientation. The disconnection. The pressure to somehow be whole. To constantly be hustling, to be moving towards…something?
Everything changes, we know that. Sometimes for the better and sometimes not, yet here we are at a precipice—and we’ve been standing at it for longer than anyone can remember.
With each new advancement—in technology, AI, media, apps, medicine—we watch the world become more connected and more chaotic. We live under a digital sun now, where attention is currency and identity is constantly curated. With an endless onslaught of social media, short-form content, algorithms, streaming services, ads, breaking news, and trends pulling us in one direction or another... and still we wonder why we feel fractured.
Let me introduce you to the serial position effect—a psychological quirk where we remember the first and last things best and lose the middle—sound a little familiar? In Journey of the Mind, the authors highlight Dr. Stephen Grossberg’s work, who was a professor at Boston University and spent over four decades dedicated to his research.
Grossberg discovered that this pattern is deeply rooted in the brain’s learning mechanisms, particularly how neurons encode novelty and importance over time. This effect reveals how our brains prioritize information for survival—by tagging beginnings (primacy) and endings (recency) as more meaningful. It also subtly shapes how we experience narratives, attention, and even identity—favoring what stands out. We hold on to big beginnings and abrupt ends, but everything in between—the nuance, the present moment—is a blur. Lost.
The pandemic only intensified this. For many, it shattered the illusion of certainty. Time blurred. Roles shifted. Minds unraveled.
“We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: we can continue to evolve consciously or remain unconscious participants in a dying system.”
I found it so incredibly poetic—and a bit ironic—that a dear friend handed me When No Thing Works just as I was approaching the middle of Journey of the Mind, and in the midst of these ongoing times of global disruption. Rather than clinging to old structures, Wong urges us to recognize the impermanence of all things, including the self.
Her writing is a quiet rebellion against constant doing, asking us instead to sit with discomfort, uncertainty, and non-doing as a path toward clarity. In a world fixated on productivity and linear progress, she reminds us that healing and insight often emerge in the overlooked in-between spaces—the very middle we usually tend to forget.
As life evolved, so did the complexity of our minds—enabling more nuanced interactions with the world and with ourselves. But with that complexity came many of the challenges we now face. The rapid advancement of our brains, our technology, and our societies has brought both brilliance and brutality. Our minds are the culmination of billions of years of evolution, each layer built upon the last. What we call our habits, thoughts, and behaviors are not just personal quirks—they are echoes of a vast, ancient inheritance.
So when I ask myself, Where is my mind today?, I’m not just checking in on my mood or my to-do list—I’m tapping into that deep evolutionary current. It’s a reminder that my thoughts are shaped by forces far older than I am, but they don’t have to define me. Journey of the Mind offers the science behind how we are shaped; When No Thing Works offers the space to unshape, to loosen our grip. Wong reminds us that sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is to stop grasping, stop fixing, and just sit with what is.
We are not our thoughts.
We are not our roles.
We are not even our history.
We are, perhaps, something much quieter beneath it all.
A presence.
A witness.
A question.
So—where is my mind today?
Still wandering, yes. But with more awareness of the path it takes, the path to which it leads, and sometimes that’s enough.
For those who find themselves wanting to know more about this months topic, here’s some links you’ll need a long the way:
