Hi, my name is Andy and welcome to Radiohead Space.

I hope you had a good weekend, it's Monday morning and a few weeks back.

I had a good fortune to celebrate my birthday and one of the nice things about my birthday

is I get to share it with a very good friend of mine.

We were born in a similar part of the world, we were born on the same day about three hours

apart and we grown up together and I have a good fortune still of seeing him on my birthday,

on his birthday, our birthday.

And as he walked in through the gate the other day, he said, brother, happy birthday, I

can't believe we're still here.

And it's an interesting thing, I think with birthdays, it's so easy as you get to a certain

age to start feeling a little unhappy or uneasy.

It reminded me of an exercise we had to do at one particular monastery.

We had to sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and make a list of all the people

who had passed away in our life that we knew of.

And the idea of course was to focus sort of on this idea of mortality and to try to

generate a sense of appreciation simply for being alive.

And as part of this exercise, it got more sort of particular.

I can't remember how old I was at the time, some remember in my mid 20s I think, but

I had to make a list of everyone I knew who had died under the age of 30.

And at first you kind of might think, well, probably can't be that many people.

But as I started writing, so you do a more and more names and these weren't necessarily

all people that I knew really well, all friends.

...