The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Lord, I need this book.

But this book told me to Eff Off and we parted ways after I made it about halfway through.

Tolle, made famous largely because of some woman named Orpah Winfree – I don’t know, never heard of her – touts living in The Now, the only place we can control.The past is done so don’t dwell on it, the future never happens because it’s always The Now … that’s pretty much what I got from it.

He does a lot of dialogue between himself and The Reader. He presumes a lot about the Reader and I was all, bitch, this is for my book club, I’m not staring out the window at the leaves of trees and seeing them in a whole new light. I don’t think he envisioned someone like me, reading this book on my iPhone on my lunch break at work while I’m also Facebooking and Gmailing and whatever, or pulling it up while I’m chasing my kids through the backyard, looking for that moment of Zen in my otherwise chaotic, frenetic existence. I’m probably the antithesis of his reader.

And he even calls me out. Some people won’t get this book, he says. True that.

But I WANT to. I really do need something like “The Power of Now” in my life. Maybe I’m not ready to hear his message? Tolle repeated the main message of the book about 13,413 times in just the half of the book that I was able to get through, but it still didn’t resonate.

Like the person Tolle describes in “The Power of Now,” I worry too much. I keep myself awake with the worry. I think about the past. I think about the future. I worry. I talk myself up. I do all the “what if” scenarios that could be, could have been. Tolle says this is the mind controlling me. The mind, apparently, is pretty much a dictator. (Don’t picture Sasha Baron Cohen here – just don’t! Oops. It’s too late. You’re picturing him. And now he’s in that man thong he wore in Borat. Stop!) See? The mind is worried you’re buying too much into this Ekhart Tolle stuff and sent you that nasty image of Borat just to distract you!

I would love to be able to break free and not have the nagging worry all the time. This book just didn’t do it for me.