These Four Things Are Essential To My Life's Journey

(Headspace Studios intro plays) Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to the start of the week, Monday morning. Now, you may already have kids, you may not have them yet but if you could teach your kids just one valuable lesson, the most valuable lesson that you think they would benefit from in their life, what would it be? You know I have some friends who believe the most important thing is that their child feels loved no matter what else happens. That's the most important thing, that's the most valuable lesson. I have another friend who thinks it's honesty. He always says to his son, you know, I don't care what you do, as long as you tell me the truth. That is the most important thing in life. And a friend asked me the other day, what would I teach my sons? What do I try to teach my sons? Well, when my son sits still for long enough to actually listen to me, you know, I will always come back to the four foundations that were taught to me at the beginning, at the monastery. I genuinely have found them the most useful things. I still find them useful to this day. And because they're not beliefs, because they're just sort of fundamental truths in life, we can't really avoid them. We'll find them in every part of our life. And even when one doesn't connect or relate, you can always sort of lean on another of the four. So, I'm cheating a little bit. It's not just one thing, it's four things but I thought I'd share them with you. The first one is this idea of a precious human life. The idea that, you know, we might take life for granted, especially when things aren't going our way. When we are not enjoying life perhaps, there is a sense of taking it for granted. We don't appreciate just how precious it is and it often takes perhaps a death of a loved one or a close friend or something that really, really shocks us to cut through that chatter in the mind to get us to a point where we realize just how fortunate we are to be alive and to recognize those things that are going well. So, that's the first one. I feel like that's just useful on any given day. The second one's in permanence, the idea of change. Most of our life we are sort of fighting change, I think. Although we might have an idea that, oh, you know we're someone that enjoys change and we might thrive as a result of it, I think fundamentally, we as human beings, we like the idea of safety and security and comfort. Change can feel almost sort of threatening in some ways. And even in the mind, we might struggle with the idea that things are always changing. We might try to hold onto the things that we...