Rewind: The Small Details

(air hisses) (mouse clicks) (inspiring music) Headspace Studios. Hi, I'm Andy, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday morning. Ordinarily, whether it's through Radio Headspace or whether it's through the Headspace app, I'm often talking about our ability and the importance of zooming out in life to get a different sort of perspective on how we see things. Because very often, we get so caught up in the minutia of life that we sort of tend to overthink things and complicate things. But at the same time, there's real value sometimes in focusing on the small details. Now, that's very different from thinking about the small details. I mean, focusing on the small details. A few days back I was chatting with a colleague who used to be a journalist long time ago and one of his early assignments, he was invited to go rock climbing above the ocean in Northern England. You know, he showed me a picture of the climb and it looks exciting, but also slightly terrifying. And he was describing the climb to me as he went up with two very experienced climbers. Obviously he was safe, but he talked about the internal dialogue and the internal fear and that all he could really imagine was himself halfway up this sort of a hundred foot rock directly above the waves of the ocean below. And in his mind, that conjured up a picture which was sort of completely terrifying. And when he got to the top, he was having a conversation with one of the rock climbers who said, "Well, look, as climbers, as professional climbers, on some of those climbs, if we actually stopped and considered where we were, like this tiny speck of a human hanging onto the side of a giant cliff face on a world that's spinning around, of course, that would be absolutely terrifying. You know, we'd probably be sort of frozen in fear, but it's actually in being able to not go to that place in the mind, to not go to a place where we're sort of more likely to feel fearful and instead actually focus on just one step at a time, to focus on the next ledge, the next hold, the next foot move and by doing that, actually, there's no space to spin out, there's no room." I don't know, when I heard that, I felt that that applied to so many of us in so many situations in our life. Sometimes there's a tendency to leap forward and imagine how life's gonna go, sometimes to look back and imagine how life could have been different in some way. But actually, when we let go of both of those and we just focus on the small details of today, there's something incredibly grounding about that. There's actually not a lot of room for anxiety or fear. There's something about just being present with what we're doing in that moment. So whatever you're doing today, wherever you're...