You know I love a great quote. You know I love great poetry. You know I love the great spiritual thinkers.

So I'm going to start my show with one great thinker today.

A mat, do me a favour, my producer. Would you put a lovely bit of ambient music behind this?

One of my favourite thinkers is the Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chodran who wrote, Life's Work is to Wake Up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake

you up rather than put you to sleep.

And the only way to do this is to open, be open,

be curious and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along. Get to know it,

get to know its nature, and let it teach you what it will. Because it's going to stick around

until you learn your lesson.

Yes, you can leave your marriage.

You can quit your job.

You can only go where people are going to praise you.

You can manipulate your world until you're blue in the face

to try to make it always smooth.

But the same old demons will always come up until finally you've learnt your lesson,

the lesson they came to teach you.

Now I've gone back on these words so many times during difficult periods of my life.

And of course, I've been thinking of them a lot recently.

And for me, one of the greatest lessons the pandemic has taught us is just how interdependent we all are, how much we actually need each other, and how much our actions impact each other in ways

we might never have even been previously aware of.

And I think many of us have learnt lessons that we will take forward when this two passes.

Because we've realised that the old ways of doing things can no longer serve us in the way that they once did.

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