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

I had the good opportunity to sit down with an incredible young woman called Alison who

is facing terminal cancer. And as part of that, she's exploring life, she's exploring

her own life, she's exploring the lives of others through the lens of having no time

to waste. It was an incredibly inspiring, for me like incredibly inspiring conversation

I feel like there is nothing like that sense of urgency to sort of narrow the focus of

what is important and what's precious in life. We got into a conversation about cancer,

cancer myself, a number of years back and we were talking about the journey of that. I was

very very fortunate by comparison and had operation, went into remission and everything else

and thankfully hasn't come back. For her it's a very different situation where she's

gone into remission at times, it's come back, she's kind of thought it was gone again and

it's come back again and it's been incredibly persistent. She's really sort of come to terms

with this idea that it's not necessarily going to disappear. And we got into a conversation

not only about the journey of cancer but also the philosophy of the approach and look

really easy. For those of us who aren't facing a terminal diagnosis, really easy to sit

there and wax lyrical on what kind of philosophy might be. And I can say prior to having cancer

like I may have had one idea about how I might approach it and retrospectively I look

back and think actually in that situation kind of feels a little different you know.

But we were talking about it and I was blown away by her approach and her philosophy.

But we got into something very particular about the idea of how to approach cancer or any

kind of illness or pain this way in a sort of a skillful way approaching it perhaps with

love rather than hate, perhaps with a sense of patience rather than impatience, perhaps

...