Feel Less Alone

(gentle music) Hi, I'm Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday morning. Yesterday I was having a chat with a friend of mine and he's far more, should we say, studious than me. I mean, he just gets through a lot of books. I aspire to that. I'd like to read more books. I just don't feel like there's a whole lot of time right now to do that. Anyway, he was telling me about a book and I'm ashamed I don't even remember the name of it. You might have heard of it, it describes this underground world where everything is connected on the planet. Where trees are connected, plants are connected. Essentially, everything is talking to each other in its own sort of way. As he was telling me, I said, "Oh I know exactly what you're talking about. I haven't read the book but I was watching the "Magic School Bus" with my six year old son and actually, they were talking about it on there." I feel like I downloaded a lot of information at the right level in about five or 10 minutes by watching that cartoon. But it is a genuinely fascinating concept. It's not even a concept, it's real. It's something that happens. For example, if a tree is not getting enough water, then the other trees nearby will give up some of their water so that that other tree can have more water. If one tree is struggling in one way it will communicate with the others and the others will try to feed nutrients towards that tree. Essentially, a sense that everything is shared and that everything is connected in some way. I like the idea that we are not so different as human beings. We are all interconnected. Our mind, whether we like it or not. There is a connection that happens. It's around us everywhere we look in nature, sometimes it's underground, we can't see it. Sometimes it's on the surface and we can see it. It's really easy not to notice those things. It's really important that we do notice those things. Because if they're not at the forefront of our mind then we forget about them or we take them for granted. Every time we notice them, we are reminded and in being reminded, it reinforces that sense of connection. It reminds us of how we are not isolated in the world, how we are not separate in the world and how ultimately we are all part of the same thing. And that may seem sort of a bit philosophical in nature but actually the reality of it, of connecting with another person, the people we know, the people we care about and also the people we don't know the people we may not care about, that has a real outcome, a real result. Not just for ourselves but also for those other people. So I thoroughly recommend one, that you check out that book...