Sunday Morning: Sum

~ Live & Learn

This is a short film by Temujin Doran based on the work of neuroscientist and writer David Eagleman’s book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives:

“You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.”

Source: Brainpickings – How You Spend Your Life: A Cinematic Sum of the Hours, Days

29 thoughts on “Sunday Morning: Sum”

  10. 
There are so many great moments.. that we don’t recognize…
    “(We are) mayflies
 visiting
 between
 heaven 
and 
earth, 
infinitesimal 
grains 
in 
the 
vast 
sea,
 mourning 
the
 passing
 of 
our 
instant 
of 
life, 
envying
 the 
long 
river 
which
 never 
ends!
”
    The 
Red
 Cliff, 
Part 
I
 By
 Su
 Shi
 (1037 – 1101)

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  12. Stunning break down..wow. I often think about the hours of my life I will never get back that I have spent ( and will spend) drying my hair (yet I refuse to cut it…)….I love this actually, this is akin to how I think about how we spend our energy – in ways that are in some way an investment (gratitude) Or a ‘down the drain’ (too easily annoyed) kind of way – and this is how we let our pennies of time drop every single day..wow!!

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