Okay, admit it. If you’re reading this blog, you’re at that age where you’re thinking about it.

Mortality.

If you are at all concerned – and who isn’t? – I recommend reading a fun book called Sum; Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman.

Eagleman is a sharp young neuroscientist who looks at life with humor and creativity. The forty short stories (2-5 pages each) in Sum are more like parables which can be read on more than one level. The main theme is that life on Earth is simpler and more fun than we humans have made it out to be, and in that sense Sum is a teasing reminder to lighten up and appreciate the now.

I laughed out loud at some of the stories, like Egalitaire, in which God in Her great generosity invites all who die to come to Heaven equally, but the outcome surprises her:

“The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote.

“So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.”

I highly recommend this book! And if you want to feel uplifted right now, watch what he has to say about his new movement, Possibilianism, at PopTech in Camden, Maine.

Kindle readers can contact me at LMSpreen@yahoo.com.