When Labels Replace Curiosity

(clicking) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hi, my name's Andy, and welcome to Radio Headspace, and to Friday morning. So a few days back, I was dressing my son and I noticed down the side of his trousers that there was a, wasn't so much a logo, it was more sort of a a little phrase, and it said, "Different together." I dunno, for some reason, sort of stuck in my mind, not just that day, but for a few days, actually. I think it's a really unusual thing in life just to celebrate our uniqueness and our differences, whilst at the same time remembering that collectively there is something that unites us all. And you know, I think that's central to the practice and the cultivation of mindfulness, awareness, compassion, the idea that there is a nature of mind that connects us all, and yet at the same time, we are all, you know, living our own lives. We have different stories and thoughts that are sort of different, and I feel like that's such an important thing to remember. I think very often in life, it's almost like we have a filing cabinet in our mind with different labels on the drawers, and we'll sort of meet people, and as we meet them, probably quite quickly, actually, we tend to assign them to a particular drawer. Obviously this is all happening sort of subconsciously. We're not sort of thinking it through. At least, hopefully not. But this idea that we sort of know where people are based on all kinds of different bits of information, and because of that, it creates a sense of we know where we are, a sense of security, of certainty, and there's maybe even a certain sort of laziness in it, too, because essentially it's moving away from that spirit of discovery, of maintaining a sense of interest, curiosity, recognizing that each and every other person is different. I'm really noticing this at the moment. I don't know about you, but certainly as we move into election season, I'm not sure we ever kind of moved out of it, actually, but there's a lot of talk about demographics, about sort of religious groups and race, and unemployed, and all these different sort of demographics, which may be very useful from a polling point of view, but I feel we really tend to encourage this way of thinking as though somehow that entire group is the same, which is so ridiculous. I mean, if we think about the unemployed, is it someone who's been unemployed for many, many years? Is someone who's just been made unemployed as a result of COVID? Is it someone who has a huge amount of possibilities and potential ahead of them and is simply waiting for the right things? Is it someone who lives in an area where there's simply no jobs available? And this applies, of course, there are so many different factors you go into, and...