Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
It's a blowy day and I'm sitting on a granite boulder on Dartmoor.
Hiding behind or I should say sheltering behind one of these dry stone granite walls as a southerly wind whips up across the moorland and it's a bright day sunshine is the order of the day and there are white puffy clouds above my head And as I look up onto the hillside in front of me,
It's gone a coppery bronze where the bracken,
Which is green in the summer,
Has turned to its autumnal colours.
And occasionally I see a shadow scoot across the hillside where a cloud has caught the sun and its shadow is on the hillside as it races by in the sky above me.
And today's reflection is all about thought and the power of thought when we believe it to have us go down rabbit holes.
And it comes from a quote that Sophie left for me by a philosopher called Epictetus.
And she left me this quote and I thought,
I really want to share this with you because I feel that this is a really good exploration.
And the quote goes like this.
People are disturbed not by the things that happen,
But by their opinions about the things that happen.
People are disturbed not by the things that happen,
But by their opinions about the things that happen.
And I really like this quote and I want to take it a stage further with you today because I think we can all see that,
That we can see that there is a neutrality to what happens in the world.
Things happen.
Life happens and there is nothing in these events which is intrinsically emotionally stressful.
It is our opinions or our stories about what's happening.
Life happens neutrally,
It unfolds in a neutral way,
But we have a sense of how it should be and then we can get upset by the way it turns out.
So I the other day was talking to a couple of women friends and we're both organising an event and one of the speakers we've invited to this event,
Out of courtesy we sent this man an email and he got back to us telling us how he thought we needed to change the way that we were going to run the session in which he had been invited to speak in.
And we gathered to meet to discuss our response to this email.
And we all had really different experiences of it.
One of the women said,
Oh,
When I read it,
It just ruined my evening.
I felt really annoyed.
Another woman said,
I'm just really angry and frustrated.
And,
You know,
I don't feel that we're being listened to.
And I was on the outskirts with a kind of a bit of a neutral feeling really because I just thought well he just sent an email.
Let's see if there's any good points in it and we can either adapt or not.
So I have a very different experience to it.
So can you see we all had a different experience from the same situation?
Now on another occasion,
Because it might sound from that example like I'm very able to see the neutrality in things,
And often I do see the neutrality in life,
But there are times when I fall down a rabbit hole.
And the other day I did just that when I was on the receiving end of messages that had me feel as though I'd been overruled and ignored and my opinions hadn't been taken into account.
And I had developed a whole story about how unfair this was and how nobody listened to me and how I didn't feel like I had a valid opinion that needed to be heard and I fell down a rabbit hole where I intensely felt insecure and unsettled.
So a messaging stream had made me feel like that.
When I actually had conversations with the people involved,
I realized I'd completely misinterpreted things.
But it was good for me to realize how disturbed I had been by falling down those spinning rabbit holes of thought,
Though getting involved in those thought storms,
Because I realized that when I believe the stories I tell myself about a situation,
I feel,
Feel stressed and frustrated and really downtrodden.
So today is just a reflection on that,
Is people are disturbed not by the things that happen but by their opinions about the things that happen.
And I want to just follow this on tomorrow because I want to talk about another stage of exploring this.
But let me know your reflections on today and don't forget to join me again tomorrow for another five minutes in nature.
