Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for atheists and twelve-step programs are the first few steps. In particular, the requirement to believe in a Higher Power as you know it. I may not be able to believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being who actually CARES about my inability to stop eating, but I can lay all my trust in science.

A LONG time ago, before Starling Fitness was ever born, I wrote an entry about being an atheist and my favorite methods of gathering randomness.

• Pick Me! – 11/23/2003 – Atheist

Back then, I wrote:

Since music speaks to me louder than words, I have become particularly attached to this form of divination. MusicMatch is a shareware program that will read music from CD’s and store it in any form you wish on your computer’s hard drive. I have almost every piece of music that I own on my computer’s hard drive, now. The Auto-DJ feature will randomly choose music for me for a user-specified amount of time. I can narrow the choice by stipulating a genre or artist, but I like the joy of letting it choose for me almost completely randomly (sometimes I need to hear Sleigh Ride, even if it’s March, because, to me, it’s a song more about friends and fun than about Christmas). The interpretation comes when I assign meaning to particular songs. Many times, I have found that my mind really needed to hear a particular song or even just a particular line in the lyrics and ignored almost everything else that was chosen. The solace comes from hearing the order that the mind needs in the chaos of the Auto-DJ.

MusicMatch has long ago been replaced by iTunes. Auto DJ has been replaced by the Shuffle feature, but all the rest is the same. When I’m feeling bad, I just put my iPod on Shuffle and try to listen for answers.

Overeaters Anonymous does not endorse anything on this entry or blog.