Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me,
Liz Scott.
I am right beside what used to be a putting green up here on Dartmoor.
There was a golf course that closed down a few years ago and over time the greens and the putting greens here have been taken over by sheep and the animals and everything is returning to the moorland state.
And it really gets me thinking of the differences and changes that take place that we don't imagine are going to happen.
Five years ago,
If somebody had said the golf club would be closed down,
There would have been a sense of,
Well,
That's never going to happen.
It's a thriving golf club.
It won't close down.
And yet here it is,
All these years later,
Where it's slowly being taken back by nature.
And it really gets me reflecting on the right way in life.
There was a signpost I've just passed which points in different directions.
And when I was several years younger,
Decades younger maybe is better to say,
I used to be really looking hard for the right path.
It seemed to me that I needed to take exactly the right path and then everything would be okay.
And I feel that today is a reflection on the changing nature of things,
How things seem to evolve rather than setting something down a bit like a railway line and then setting your train on the railway line and it chugging off into the distance without deviating off course.
That doesn't feel to me what my life is about at all.
On the contrary,
As I look at the footpaths I might take in life,
I realised there are many options.
And sometimes what happens,
And it's just happened to me now actually,
I was just about to embark on a trail on the moor,
Which goes into a narrow space beside a stone wall and some gorse bushes,
So it's sort of a bit of a bottleneck,
Which is quite unusual here on Dartmoor because it's a very open,
Wide space.
And just as I was approaching the path,
I could see a lady ahead of me with a golden retriever.
She was walking a bit slower than I'm walking,
Heading to the same spot.
Fault.
And I just realised like,
Oh,
I don't think I am going to go that way after all.
It felt interesting that my intention to go in one direction had suddenly shifted.
It actually reminded me,
I don't know if you know the Narnia books,
But in the Narnia books,
The Lion,
The Witch and the Wardrobe,
The first time all the children find their way into Narnia through the back of the wardrobe is when they're trying to get out of the way of somebody who's visiting the house.
To make sure that they don't get seen and so they hide in a wardrobe and find their way into Narnia.
It's almost like life has you do things even though your expectation is that that's not the way your life is going to go.
And so I want to really explore with you and for you to reflect and explore yourself that life has a way of evolving and we have no power over that evolution.
Many people feel like they want to be in control and they want life to turn out a certain way.
And the more that I've seen that in my world,
Well,
The more I've seen that it doesn't really work like that,
The less I'm inclined to encourage people to seemingly take control in their life.
What seems truer for me is that there are many paths,
And it's about really deeply feeling in to which is the right path for you.
And even when you set off on a path,
It might be that you then change direction.
It doesn't matter.
All that seems to matter as far as I'm aware,
Is that it's about listening into that intuitive wisdom and allowing that intuitive wisdom to guide the way for me to use that to take one step at a time.
So I guess today is a reflection on you seeing where you are in the path of your life.
Do you see it a bit like a train line where you lay down the train line and then suddenly you are on a trajectory that doesn't deviate from the rails itself?
Or are you on an evolving path,
One where different tracks appear,
Where you think you're going one way and then you realize it's a different direction for you to take?
Are you open to the fact that something,
A bit like the golf club here,
That something that feels it is absolutely right for you in the moment might in time change?
Today is a reflection on the evolving nature of life and how it's really good just to take one step at a time.
Let me know your reflections.
And of course,
Don't forget to join me again tomorrow for another 5 minutes in nature.
