Hi, my name's Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Friday morning.

So a few days back I was dressing my son and I noticed down the side of his trousers

that there was a, there was a much a logo, it was more sort of a little phrase and it said

different together. I don't know for some reason, sort of stuck in my mind, not just that

day but for a few days actually. I think it's a really unusual thing in life just to celebrate

our uniqueness and our differences whilst at the same time remembering that we collectively

there is something that unites us all in, you know, I think that's central to the practice

and the cultivation of mindfulness, awareness, compassion, the idea that there is a nature

of mind that connects us all and yet at the same time we are all, you know, living our

own lives, we have different stories, the thoughts as sort of different. And I feel like there's

such an important thing to remember, I think very often in life, it's almost like we have a

filing cabinet in our mind with different labels on the drawers and we'll sort of meet people

and as we meet them, probably quite quickly actually, we tend to assign them to a particular

drawer. Obviously this is all happening, sort of subconsciously, we're not sort of thinking

it through, it's hopefully not, but this idea that we sort of know where people are based

on all kinds of different bits of information. And because of that, it creates a sense of

we know where we are, a sense of security of certainty and there's maybe even a certain

sort of laziness in it too. Because essentially it's moving away from that spirit of discovery

of maintaining a sense of interest, curiosity, recognizing that each and every other person

is different. And really noticing this at the moment, I don't know about you, but certainly

as we move into election season, I'm not sure we ever kind of moved out of it actually,

but there's a lot of talk about demographics, about sort of religious groups and race and

...