Hi, it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace.

So a few days back I was listening to a story about very elderly artist, a painter.

He was being asked about his life's journey, I think he was already in his 90s,

and he was being asked about the creative aspect of his journey, but also the idea of success

and fame. His job was not about what people thought of the painting, it was about the act of

painting itself. I thought a beautiful idea, that is. If we look at it through the lens of mindfulness,

it really applies equally to anything and everything we do in life. There's a very fixed idea,

I think, for most of us, as to what defines success and what defines failure, and we may feel

after a certain event that we might look back retrospectively and try and judge that in some

way as either successful or as having failed. But that's really sort of just commentary,

it's just an additional story around the event, it doesn't really have any basis, in fact.

And even if we are able to judge it, it's relative to that moment, we may look back at what we

once thought was a success 10 years later, we may think, oh wow, actually that was maybe not the turn

I was after in life. We may look back at something that didn't go well, but at the time we thought

was a failure. And yet if we look back and think, wow, that really set me off in a positive direction.

Regardless of what it is, we are tempted to judge whether it's our meditation practice,

whether it's a particular skill or something that we enjoy doing in our life, whether it's our

work, whether it's our relationships. It is really important that as much as possible,

we don't get into that commentary, that judgment in the mind of success and failure.

From a meditation point of view, we can say sort of things simply are as they are in this moment.

And we could, if we were tempted to sort of say, well, yeah, but I don't know, my relationship

didn't work out. Surely that has to be a failure. Well, we could give it that commentary,

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