True heaven.

Tim Urban introduced this fun thought exercise: Each block below represents 10 minutes of your day. You have a total of 100 blocks (1,000 minutes) every day since the moment you wake up until you go to bed, with the healthy assumption that you sleep 7-8 hours a night.

This is your day in blocks (Tim also illustrates your life in weeks here). How do you want to spend each block? Where do you invest your attention in? And what values are you voting for with each investment?

To complicate this exercise, it is important to note that each outer action we take elicits certain inner emotional response and vice versa. For example, watching porn makes us feel horny and feeling horny entices us to watch porn. But since the material realm is easier to grasp, we have a stronger tendency to look out into the world and think of what we would like to experience (e.g. have clean dishes, become a programmer, travel to Andorra) then go back and plot our days in a way that supports this experience (e.g. clean the dishes, study coding 4 hours a day, save up).

The problem comes if our goal is relatively far away yet we don't acquire regular check-ins with our emotional topography. We easily lose touch with our sense of wellbeing by methods of oppressing, denying, rationalizing our emotional disconnection with a fixed goal in mind. We are trained to think that "when I come there, I will be happy", as if our life is an upward staircase with the Eden goal at the top of it.

But our life never exists at the end of the staircase. It never has and never will. There is no staircase, no upward or downward. Each box we live is an end in itself. While our heart is still pulsing, there is no destination we can reach that would offer permanent salvation. The illusion of a distant heaven has robbed humanity of our heaven in the now.

Beyond thinking about how to spend our 100 blocks in terms of wishes and goals, which is important, I invite both of us to also live each block with total awareness. When we are in touch with our emotional, mental, a physical experience, we are receiving an abundant of information that guides us to understand and adjust our goals accordingly. And instead of only plotting our life based on external events, what inner events do you want to fill your life with?