Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
Well I'm back on Dartmoor after a few days in Exeter,
The city of Exeter and it's so good to be home.
When I was in Exeter the final morning I was in Exeter was a Monday morning and Monday the start of the work week was really busy.
It was busy as I walked along the river path with lots of cyclists and lots of people running.
This time there was a sense they were against the clock.
The cyclists were commuters,
The runners I think were out before heading off to work.
There was a real sense that people were plugged into their earbuds,
Had their heads down and were just getting from A to B.
And when I walked through the streets of Exeter the traffic was busy,
It was busier with pedestrians waiting for the shops to open.
Everything had a feeling of busyness and hurriedness about it.
It was interesting because that really contrasted with the day before on the Sunday which was a more leisurely day and that's the day I normally walk up into Exeter when I'm with my mum and I know it's going to have leisure cyclists.
There are people that aren't rushing around but are stopping for a cup of coffee and there's just a sense of things being slower and it really reminded me actually of the difference that I might feel with my mind.
Sometimes I feel slower with my mind and when I feel slower,
Like on a Sunday when I'm walking in Exeter,
I just notice more things.
I notice the birds,
The wildlife on the river,
I see the rowers,
I notice what's going on when I'm in a more busy mindset,
When I've got lots of things to do,
Well that's a bit like a Monday morning in the city centre.
I'm more focused on more looking at getting somewhere,
The journey itself is not so important.
So those two different days just remind me of my different mindsets and it just then got me reflecting further on some of the rituals and the things that we no longer do that used to be part and parcel of our everyday life.
The joy of receiving a letter,
A letter from somebody in the post,
Handwritten,
A stamp on it where there's that lovely ritual of opening up the letter and then reading this news which is always obviously a few days out of date but the sense of hearing the voice of the person and also reading their writing,
They've written this by hand,
What a joy it was to receive a letter and of course to write a letter,
The ritual of writing a letter,
Of addressing it,
Of sharing thoughts and feelings in writing,
Handwriting and putting a stamp on the envelope and putting it in the post and not quite knowing when that person had received or read that letter.
There's something rather lovely in the slowness of the ritual or if I needed to get information when I was younger I relied on the library,
There was a reference library in our town and if you wanted to find out something and you didn't know who to ask you would go to the reference library and find a book and look it up,
Sit down on a wooden desk and flick through the book until you found what you were looking for.
In the days before the internet libraries were the storage place of knowledge and there's also my friend who's recently got herself one of these very snazzy hot taps which is a tap is like a faucet and you can use it to produce hot water hot enough for a cup of tea and I was admiring it saying gosh that looks really handy and she said yes but I miss the ritual of boiling a kettle,
Of putting tea in a teapot,
Of allowing the tea to stew and then pouring it.
I miss that ritual,
Speeding it up has lost something from the process rather than gained something and so today is very much a reflection on what we gain by speeding up and what we lose by speeding up,
What we gain by slowing down and what we lose by slowing down.
I'm not saying that we go back to an age where we write letters to each other and go to the library if we need to know information but what I am saying is that there is something really enriching in slowing down in having rituals and processes when we connect with people in finding time to enjoy maybe the process of connecting so there's something for me about slowing down and connecting and remembering that efficiency and speed is often at the detriment of those slower rituals that have us connect more with life and with each other.
I'd love to know your thoughts on this.
