Day 16: the day on which I write something more substantial.

Synchronicity... the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner.

I was reading ye olde Oprah magazine last night (and geez do I enjoy that mag, despite its annoying need to display Oprah as the cover model every daggum month), and came across an interview she did with Eckhart Tolle. I have not read his work, but have been curious what all the fuss is about.

Here is a key point in the article: Oprah quotes Tolle's book, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, a passage in which he describes how, at 29 years old and considering suicide he thought,

"I cannot live with myself any longer... Then suddenly I became aware of a what a peculiar thought it was. Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self" that 'I' cannot live with. Maybe...only one of them is real."

And the rest of the article (to simplify drastically) is about realizing that our thoughts are not who we are. That the voice in our head that is a litany of rehashing the past, worrying about the future, etc, is not real... that only NOW is real. I gotta say, this is kind of a lightbulb moment for me, and I really want to hold onto this. How many hours... YEARS have I wasted in my life stewing over old conversations, imagined conflict, negative thoughts and feelings about things that are completely out of my control... either because they have to do with another person's perception or are just in the past?

So I read this little passage last night, and then this morning, one of the blogs I read (Wertzateria) pointed to a new book by Lynda Barry called What It Is, and if you take a look at the book preview HERE, you can see that it deals with almost the exact same subject matter, only in a gorgeous, illustrated fashion.

Synchronicity. Gives me the feeling that there is something here I should be paying attention to. Instead of the non-stop voices in my head. :)