Are We There Yet?: A Guide to Life, Living and Death by Dennis D Hunt.
Category: Mind, Body & Spirit
Paperback: 320 pages
Language: English
ISBN: 1905886268

"While we were enjoying a meal together recently, my life asked me whether I believed in life after death. After pausing to decide if she knew more about what I had just eaten than I did, I replied that I had no doubt that life continued after death. In fact, the question, as such, was no longer a question in my mind. This naturally enough led her to ask me what I believed the form that life after death took. I tried to answer in as few words as possible, not an easy task when dealing with the infinite. But whether I satisfactorily explained what I believed or not, I will never know, for at the moment the waiter arrived and asked if we had finished our meal!

This conversation got me thinking. I have spent all of my adult life trying to find answers to the difficult questions about life that I would accept as valid. Thinking further on the subject, I realised that whilst I had found many answers that satisfied me, I had not summarised these in any way. In the past I have written a number of books on related subjects, I had not produced a definitive work setting out how I believed this thing called life worked. Something that I could place in the hands of my wife or my children and say, this is what I believe. This book is an attempt to fill that gap and leave behind my testimony on this thing called life. In this context the words of the song by ‘Mike and the Mechanics’ seem somewhat apt:

Crumpled bits of paper filled with imperfect thought, stilted conversations. I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got...

Looking back, I wish my father had left me a book like this, something that summed up what he thought about life. Now that he is gone there are still questions that I wished I had asked him. I did not meet him until 1946 when he came home from the War. As a result we were never really close. I was always closer to my mother who died when I was seven years old. There was the generation gap between my father and I that always seemed to make asking certain questions awkward. Perhaps, if for a brief period, we would have conversed as equals, there would have been the opportunity to explore more deeply those things that we shared.

So from a determination that my children should not have a similar void in their lives, this book was born. I do not present it as a definitive work about life, but simply as a book that summarises what I have found that satisfies me. It is literally the result of my lifelong searching. My attempts to make sense of this thing called life, that we are all born into, seemingly without choice, to make of it the best that we can. I regard myself as a pragmatic spiritualist; that is I am interested in those things that make greater sense of life in a practical way. That provide answers that work in everyday life. Answers that help lift depression, heal sickness and ill-health, and where this is not possible provide a philosophical framework that makes suffering more bearable. If when reading this book the reader fundamentally disagrees with my findings, then well and good. For in the disagreement will be the formulation and clarification of their own views and this is what is important, for each must follow their own path, must find their own answers to the puzzles and conundrums that life poses for them. "