The Exhaustion Of Trying To Stay Young

(soft relaxing music) Headspace Studio. (soft relaxing music) Hi, it's Dora, and you are now listening to Radio Headspace. So there's a poem I've been sharing with some of my mentees lately, a group of people who are standing right at the edge of something and are terrified to jump. Some of them are feeling the pull towards a different job, a different relationship, a different version of their lives. And the ones who eventually do jump, who say yes to the thing that frightens them, they become more themselves every single time. So the poem goes, "I will not die and unlive life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as a seed goes to the next as blossom. And that which came to me as blossom, goes on as fruit. I choose to risk my significance." That line, every time, it scares me a little, and it thrills me a little. And I think that's exactly the point because most of us, if we're honest, are playing it a little safer than we need to be, myself included, staying a little smaller than what we're capable of, waiting for the right moment, the right circumstances, the right amount of certainty before we take this step we already know somewhere deep down we need to take. (water running softly) And here's what I know to be true from my own life and from watching the people around me. The risk is always worth it. You may not know it in that moment. You know, in that moment it can feel like standing at the edge of something with no way of knowing how far it goes down. But I have never, not once, seen someone take a leap towards something true for them and regret it. Forget the timing maybe, regret how they did it, but never that they did it. The leap toward that life that is calling you is always, always worth taking. A few years ago I left nursing to teach full time, and the timing of it, let's say, was interesting. It was during the pandemic, a time when nurses were being celebrated rightly as heroes. There was a kind of nobility in that role, a sense of purpose and identity and belonging that was very meaningful and I decided to walk away from it. I felt as though something in me kept pulling in another direction, towards teaching, towards sharing what I had learned about the mind and about the practice and about what it means to actually show up for your own life, toward the dharma, in the Buddhist sense of that word. The truth that lives in all of us and...