Pretend your life ended years ago, and you’ve been living in some sort of agreeable afterlife. You don’t have real problems anymore. There’s no stress, no war, no worries, no shame.

The only downside, if you would call it that, is that you don’t get to live in the world anymore. Despite all the troubles of worldly life, most of your afterlife peers feel a bit of nostalgia about “being in the thick of it again.”

The afterlife community, among other activities, holds a weekly raffle. The prize is kept private – only the winners know what it is, and they must sign a non-disclosure agreement.

One week, you win, and accept the prize. An administrator congratulates you, you sign the papers, and he touches you on the arm.

Instantly your surroundings change.

You’re in a Costco, pushing a cart. You have a vague sense, which is fading by the moment, that you’ve just arrived here from somewhere else, but you can’t recall where.

Everything is simultaneously disorienting and familiar. The bustle and din of a busy supermarket. The polished concrete floor and the towering orange pallet racks. An overwhelming physical abundance of food and retail goods, in colorful packaging. And people, everywhere.

You feel like a fish that’s just been dropped back into the water — or perhaps one that just noticed the water for the first time.

You can go in any direction. You feel an overwhelming sense of the bottomless possibility around you — not just in the Costco, but in the world that surrounds it.

Every action creates a new experience. Maneuvering your cart around chrome-cornered freezer bunks filled with frozen cheese sticks feels perfectly right, like math that all works out. There’s just so much you could do here. And after this, there’s more. It just unfolds and unfolds.

You feel a sense of role and responsibility too. You have a watch, and a phone. Time seems to matter. Your list says paper napkins, hamburger patties, buns, cheese, relish, Coke. Oh right – there’s a barbecue later. Linda’s birthday, at the park. Having something to do feels good.

When you envision this upcoming event, familiar faces come to mind, adding another layer to that abundant feeling. You have things to do and people to see. Is this how existence has always been? You check out and pass through the cart corral room at the entrance.

All you know is that you’re crossing a parking lot under a partly cloudy sky, and that getting to do so gives you the feeling of being very lucky.

Despite this sense of abundance, it’s not all pleasant or frictionless. In the parking lot, as you back out, someone honks and swears at you. Maybe you did something wrong.

Also, the mind is occasionally alarmed at a thing it thinks about. As you exit the lot, a bubble of worry forms in your stomach: maybe you forgot something you were supposed to buy. If so, some of the people in the park will be disappointed.

Some wiser part of you kicks in here. You recall past worries that are dead now. Piles of them. Two or three concerns might still be burning out of the millions. Those will die too, dropping out of experience just like the cola displays passed out of sight when you exited to the parking lot.

The drive continues to reinforce this feeling of bottomless abundance and turnover. Looking down the streets you pass, each one is a place you could go, the sight of each giving its own unique feeling, like a row of paintings in a gallery. Each face you see has that effect too – you’ve seen so many but each one is new if you really look at it. Did life always contain an infinite parade of character actors?

Cars creep beside and beneath you on the expressway’s curving ramps, every driver and every passenger going somewhere, to do something. Buildings stretch to the horizon, filled with more people, doing things. Beyond that, rural life and wilderness. There’s infinite stuff happening, and you are embedded right in it. As far as you can tell, this is true in every direction. There’s nowhere you can go that is any less dense with detail and meaning.

You arrive home, an old duplex in a neighborhood with spindly trees planted only a few years ago. Nobody else is here yet. You unload the stuff onto the counter and put the patties in the fridge. There’s a note. Carol will come get you after she’s done work. Paul might be home by then, he’s not sure.

Uncertainty bubbles up again, about how things will go later. Again you let it rise and recede. It’s the latest of millions of endless worries. Really, the only problem is staying aware of that.

You go do some work at the computer while you have time. Monday will be busy and you want to be ready. The work isn’t fun, but it is fundamentally satisfying to have so much to do, and to be doing some of it. You appreciate having all these tools, and a little space carved out to do your work in.

You hear the jingle of keys in the back door, and feel a surge of abundance again – you get to see one of your people, and you don’t know which one. A whole afternoon is about to unfold, one of thousands. (Can that be true?) More people, more doing, more unfolding.

You get up, and as you’re padding down the hallway, it all disappears. You’re back in the calm and problemless ambience of the afterlife, comprehending for the first time what the prize was.

“Did you enjoy your hour back in the fold?” the administrator asks.

“Oh, yes,” you say, feeling the ghost of the duplex around you still. “Really. More than ever.”