Anticipation Exhaustion

Remember when you were a little kid and there was something exciting coming up? For me, it was often a visit to my cousin's in Wisconsin or a trip to my best friend's cabin. I would get so excited about it so far in advance of the actual event that, by the time the happy day finally rolled around, I would be exhausted, verging on depressed. Flash forward thirty years and I'm using all of my powers to hold anticipation at bay while I consider that in seven days time I will be headed to Belize for a week in the sun.

For this vacation, I am bringing two books that I'm pretty excited about. The first is called "Evidence of the Afterlife, The Science of Near-Death Experiences." Let me back up and explain this one. I was walking from the gym back to work one day, thinking about people who have had near-death experiences (don't ask). And I started to wonder, is it true that everyone sees the bright light and dead relatives welcoming them towards a peaceful place? Or is that just an American experience? Has anyone explored stories from other cultures and found a consistent experience? And could it really just be a chemical process that happens in the human brain that produces this similar experience of near-death? As these questions rolled around in my brain, I knew that there I was certainly not the first person to wonder about these things. After a ten minute search on Amazon, I came up with this book, recently published by author Jeffrey Long, MD.

My second vacation book is "Truth & Beauty" by Ann Patchett. Just because I love Ann Patchett.

I recently finished reading "The Girls" by Laurie Lansens, a novel written in the style of an autobiography of conjoined twins Ruby and Rose. Rose is the real writer, and her writing improves with each chapter, the images becoming more alive and her stories more colorful. Her sister Ruby also writes a few chapters, and while her style is much more like a journal, she graces the story with a very different perspective, a great sense of humor, all the while innocently giving away her sister's biggest secrets. Lansens does an excellent job of bringing these girls alive and heart-breakingly real. A big thank you to my sister-in-law Michelle for this Christmas gift. It was a real page-turner.

For now, I anxiously await my next two books, which I'll soon read from the hammock of my cabana on a 15-acre island somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. Sweet, exhausting anticipation.