Our current form may not be our only form, and the idea of coming back as, say, a butterfly is enchanting — if you believe in that sort of thing, at least.

A key tenet of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions, reincarnation is predicated on belief in a soul that migrates from one corporeal vessel to another on its journey; the body itself is fairly unimportant. On a practical level, that means that you might have been a house cat in a previous life and could be a blue whale next time. As potential afterlives go, it’s certainly one of the most compelling.