Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott,
My daily reflections as I go out for a walk and I'm up on Dartmoor again very wet underfoot.
We've had so much rain over recent weeks everything is squelchy and muddy and there's a real cold dampness in the air today.
I can really feel that winter is still saying I am not done yet and I want to follow on actually from what I was talking about yesterday.
Do you remember I was sharing this experience I'd had I'd been doing some writing and I'd gone to some technical difficulties and I lost bits and gotten a bit of a pickle really and the irony of it was is that what I was writing which was a book about my pilgrimage was really reminding readers to slow down and the benefits of slowing down and yet here I was getting in a right pickle trying to speed things up trying to get this final edit done before I can send it to a copy editor and then hopefully somebody to do some illustrations and then hopefully to get it printed so I was in this sort of this mode of oh I just need to get to the end of this I want to I'm fed up of doing this I want to get to the end of it and then I had such I got such a pickle with technology yesterday I had to just leave my computer leave the desk and go for a walk and I connected with you as I was doing that and today I looked at my computer looked at the writing and realised what I need to do is I need to discard everything I did yesterday everything and what occurred to me is that this again is great learning the pilgrimage that I walk might be over and the book I'm writing is a reflection on that pilgrimage but the lessons just keep repeating themselves and one of the lessons from the pilgrimage that felt so clear was this lesson about the journey and the destination and for me walking was a beautiful way of appreciating a journey now sure I had a destination or maybe several destinations each day places I wanted to visit but it wasn't the purpose of my walking to visit these places the purpose was to walk and visit them and then leave them walking and reflect on them it was like there was a the whole purpose was in this much slower space of reflection walking being present and then processing what I'd experienced that was the point of it it wasn't about doing things quickly or walking quickly or getting to the end of the day quickly and that was the lesson I learned again yesterday it was like this is not a rush to get it done the actual process of the writing of the editing of putting in subtitles of adding reflections this is all part of it this is not something to do and get done the process of writing the process of reflecting is part of the whole pilgrimage journey of writing a book and that feels so clear for me today so clear so I've gone right back to the beginning scrubbed everything I did yesterday I must have spent six or seven hours on it yesterday scrubbed it all gone back to the beginning gone back to the starting point and I'm starting again afresh so today is a reflection for you and I guess there are a few layers to this firstly do you set yourself goals and then rush headlong towards them is that your way of operating in the world does that serve you and the second layer is around what is it that you are missing out on in speeding up your life and when I talk about speeding up your life that could be taking your car rather than walking or it could be about texting a friend rather than visiting them for a coffee or it could be about the way you are writing something and you're rushing through it on the computer rather than slowly writing and then reading and reflecting on what you've written you're sort of pushing things forward more quickly there are many many ways you might be pushing forward in your life and the question today I'm asking you to reflect on does that feel right for you are you being asked to slow down is there a realization for you that the journey is as important as the destination in fact maybe it's better to say the journey is the destination that's what it's all about I'd just love to know what reflections come to you today as you listen to this on Insight Timer
