here's the main problem I have

life is too short and we aren't young enough long enough to enjoy it to its full extent. There are so many things I'd like to do in addition to what I'm currently doing. I can think of at least two, no three other professions I would've like to have explored and hundreds of places I'd like see but there just isn't enough time. I want to say it isn't fair except in the immortal words of Sylvia M. "fair is a weather term."

Which is why I think death is a ripoff.

Which is also why I hold onto this small hope that maybe it isn't. Maybe death isn't the end, maybe it's just a way station we come back to, like the bardu in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, which wonders "how might human history be different if 14th-century Europe was utterly wiped out by plague, and Islamic and Buddhist societies emerged as the world's dominant religious and political forces? The Years of Rice and Salt considers this question through the stories of individuals who experience and influence various crucial periods in the seven centuries that follow. The credible alternate history that Robinson constructs becomes the framework for a tapestry of ideas about philosophy, science, theology, and politics."

But the really interesting part in my mind was  the  "small cast of recurring characters who live through each episode of the book as soldiers, slaves, philosophers and kings. Dying, they spend time in the afterlife [the bardu], only to be reborn into the next era, generally with no knowledge of their past lives." Or their knowledge of one another within the bardu.

I wonder if that isn't true. That we are all connected somehow only don't know it except in death.

And yeah. This is the crazy shit I think about, can't sleep because of, drive myself crazy with.