My "Sein" dozed off during a snack

I hate it when I sit at the desk at work and realize that, without any conscious awareness, I inhaled my snack.

It can't be! Then I frantically look inside the garbage bin under my desk, and surely, there it is... the bag/wrapper/apple core/banana peel that once contained my snack-allocated calories for the day. When did this happen? I didn't even get to enjoy it.

And then there are times when I drive and reach my destination without ever knowing how I got there and whether I ran any lights or hit any people on the way. Terrifying.

So it's rather fitting that I am "reading" (listening to on my iPod) Eckhard Tolle's "Power of Now". I know his more recent book "A New Earth" was an Oprah pick. she even developed some online sessions around reading and discussing the lessons from this book. Although I am not necessarily an Oprah book cult follower, this one did catch my attention, especially since the author has a somewhat computerized voice (think "Fitter, happier, more productive" track from Radiohead's OK Computer album). So I decided to check it out.

I am a total skeptic, so I don't necessarily buy into anything very easily, but two things I digested and accepted from Tolle's teachings is that 1) my consciousness (Being, or "Sein" as my fellow Germans would call it) is not my thoughts, and my thoughts are not my identity, and 2) my thoughts are stuck in the past and in the future - they are never present. This is my very lose interpretation. So to be rid of the burden of your thoughts, you got to focus on the present moment. You got to be alert and aware of your surroundings. If I were more present, as Tolle recommends, I would not have had my snack mysteriously disappear.

I am not sure whether I will finish this audiobook. I think I got a jist of it - and I can only listen to a computer-generated voice for so long before my thoughts turn to the daily to-do lists and my existential anxieties.

On another note, logging calories daily is really tedious. I am trying to stay under 1,600 daily, and in the past few days, I averaged around 1,400. Yay me! I also got to show off my incredibly uncoordinated moves during today's group cardio dance class. Let's just say that my dance rendition of "Soldier Boy" would make it on YouTube for all the wrong reasons.