Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
Goodness me it's been a wild wild day today and you can probably tell I'm not actually out in nature at the moment I'm inside well and truly inside.
It's been gusty it's been stormy we've had extensive rain.
I did go out earlier in the day I was helping a neighbor walk a dog and got thoroughly soaked everything now is dripping beside the fire and I've come into my office to talk to you because it's just too wet and wild to speak outside and today and tomorrow I'm going to look at two particular areas and for me these have arisen because of the journey I've taken exploring my dad's earlier life speaking to some of his relatives.
If you were listening yesterday you'll know that I've been up in Suffolk which is a county in the east of England.
My dad who died last year he was actually born and brought up in Suffolk and so we still as a family have cousins and a couple of of his siblings and aunt and an uncle are still alive and they actually live in Suffolk and today is all about the way that we have different stories about things that have happened.
We met up with my dad's younger brother he's still quite sharp he's an older man now we never really contacted him or had much contact with him when we were younger.
My dad gravitated much more to his older siblings and when people came to visit or we went to see people it was his older siblings that tended to be the ones that we got to know.
My dad's younger brother my uncle we never really got to know and just speaking to him I began to realize that he was recalling memories that my dad also recalled but for my uncle my dad's younger brother those memories and recollections seemed very different and what I really see and what I've begun to see by starting to speak to cousins people that I haven't really spoken to in years is that there are very different versions of events and like many families the wider family that I'm part of there are misunderstandings there are people siblings that aren't speaking to each other cousins that no longer want to connect and actually when I went to visit Suffolk I felt quite sad to realize that there was so many connection threads that almost were severed because of the way that people interpreted different situation and different stories and for example my my uncle my dad's younger brother he stayed at home he was brought up with his mother his father died when he was a baby but he was brought up at home and he always longed to go away to school my dad went to boarding school and my dad went to boarding school but I think he always slightly envied that his younger brother was able to stay at home and so these stories that continue to grow during childhood and then adolescence and then adulthood can look and feel so real they can look and feel so real so much so that you tell the story that looks and feels real to you and yet that story is so different than the story that somebody else is telling to their side of the family and for me it's a great reminder of the power of thought you see what thought does is it creates stories it creates meaning and the stories and the meaning that it creates look and feel real everybody is doing the best they can with thoughts and thinking that they have in that moment and for me it's such a great reminder of the power of thought so today is just to say remember you see a situation and create a story about it somebody else will see the same situation and create a story about it the truth is that there is no absolute truth of what happened however many people experience that situation there will be that many truths and I'm using the word truths in inverted commas as to what actually happened so be aware that we all see things differently there will always be a different perspective on everything that we see and it's just worth remembering that that's the way that thought works
