What if . . . when you die . . . there is an afterlife and that afterlife is this:  You live your same life over…exactly…

Except, instead of living events sequentially….have insomnia, shut off the alarm, get up, go to the kitchen, take out an apple because today’s the day you change how you eat, grab a piece of cold pizza because you just don’t have the energy to deprive yourself today, kiss your spouse, stub your toe on the dog dish, back out of the drive way hitting the garbage can, hit the steering wheel, look down and see that you’re late already….

However….in this afterlife….you live the same life…but each separate activity, no matter how brief.. .is lumped together.  Yep.  In this afterlife, you are talking yourself into climbing out of bed for two years, stubbing your toe for a week, you’re making dentist appointments for six hours, eating birthday cake for two hours, trying to decide whether you should give low-carbohydrate eating another try for a year….four months you spend driving around lost….two months saying you are not lost….six years worrying about thing that didn’t happen….a year with a cold….

And so it goes.  This notion is not my idea but comes from Sum by Dr. David Eagleman in whose audience I was privileged to be a couple of weeks ago.  Dr. Eagleman, a neuroscientist and Head of the Neuroscience Lab at Baylor Medicine, started his book as a way of considering afterlife possibilities but ended up with a wonderful set of forty possibilities that have the effect of directing his readers–not so much to think about afterlife–but about life.

Take a minute.  What if you knew that your afterlife would be everything over in lumps?  Would you choose your life moments more carefully? 

Would you learn to say “No” to the painful, time-robbing, ineffective strategies of your Emotional Guidance System? 

The “what ifs”…” the self torture… the bad decisions serving no purpose except to shake off anxiety?

I don’t have the big answers yet.  But I picked up a few hints from “Lockup/Raw” in the wee hours this morning.  For now, it’s enough to say I left Dr. Eagleman’s lecture a bit thoughtful. I went by Eatzi’s (incredible gormet take-out) which is my habit while bunked in my Hilton Branch Headquarters.  As I did every night, I headed straight for the cocktail shrimp.  Now the word cocktail is a bit miss leading.  These babies go for $39.99 a pound and a half-pound is four to five. I study the size of the shrimp….should I have four…which should be enough…or five…sheesh….what if that’s more than $20 bucks?  For a few shrimp?… Then I rememberd the possible afterlife….and ordered five. 

I didn’t want to spend another second than I already had in the bank under “time spent trying to decide between four or five shrimp.”