Start Living Life One Step at a Time

(mouse clicking) (gentle music) Headspace Studio. (soft chiming music) (gentle upbeat music) Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace, and to Thursday morning. Now, a few weeks back, I had a good fortune to speak to an old friend of mine and it's one of those friends who, you know, you don't necessarily see them that often in life, but whenever you do get the chance to either see them or speak to them, you feel really happy, really energized by the experience. Actually, Marcus might be listening this morning, hi Marcus, if you are. Now Marcus lives over in Switzerland and is surrounded by these amazing mountains and countryside, and recently has been taking a lot of walks, often out on sort of these trails where you don't necessarily see too many other people. And he was describing to me a walk that he took recently where he was going up a path where it became increasingly unsteady, perhaps even a little bit dangerous, and how he started to see signs saying, "This path is unstable", maybe, "Don't go any further." Now you would've thought those signs were enough sort of warning to maybe turn around and go back down, but he decided to sort of carry on anyway. And he said as he continued, he sort of found himself becoming increasingly caught up in thinking. So there was a sense of, look, you know, he's still fairly young, he has a young family, he cares for his life. And he also found himself sort of worrying about his predicament. Was he gonna find himself in an even more dangerous position? What was around the corner? Was the path gonna become impassible? As this sort of thinking started to gain momentum in the mind, his mind became increasingly sort of foggy, increasingly clouded. Essentially that fear and anxiety meant that there was no sort of clarity of thought. And he said the only way he was able to continue was to focus on taking one step at a time. Now, I've done a bunch of walking meditation, as in formal walking meditation with Marcus a long time ago, and it's interesting when you take that into a real life context, when you take that into a situation like this, we're still working with the same principles of just being so present with the sensations in the body and of each physical movement, that there's almost not room to get caught up in that thinking. We're not denying the thinking, we're not suppressing the fear. By focusing our attention on one thing in this present moment, there simply isn't room for the mind to get lost in the future or lost in the past. So he described as he was sort of walking up this hill and the only way he could continue was by focusing on one step at a time. And I think it's such a perfect metaphor for so many aspects of life where we...