Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
I am taking a very very slow walk this morning across Dartmoor.
I am just on a little rocky track that is going to lead me to the path that takes me home and I have been going at a glacial pace.
You probably remember I hurt my back a couple of days ago and I am still feeling a lot of discomfort from it and I am learning a lot from it too and I want to share the learning really because I know that once the pain goes,
And I am pretty sure it will go,
I will forget all this.
So I guess the thing is first of all that slowing down has taken on another level in what I am doing at the moment.
I physically cannot do anything quickly and I am very limited in what I can do.
So much so that I look at things which would normally be something I would just get on and crack on with and complete and I know that physically I cannot do them at the moment.
So the first thing I am realising is that it is okay to be slow and I am always keen to learn the lessons when I am experiencing anything.
What is the lesson in this for me?
What I am seeing is that as I walk slow,
And I am going so slowly on my walks,
I do notice more and when I go slowly on my walks I also realise that I don't have an acceleration speed.
I can't speed up or go any faster.
I just take one step,
Small step at a time and be gentle as I walk.
So I am kind of experiencing a different level of slowness and I am finding that really interesting.
The other thing I am realising is I need to ask for help more.
Help in many tasks that I just have taken for granted every morning,
Like putting on my socks,
I can't do at the moment.
So I need to ask my husband for help and we actually have quite a laugh about it,
But it just reminds me of the importance of asking for help.
You see I can't physically put my socks on at the moment,
So I do need help.
But actually there are things in my world I can ask for help with that I could do,
But maybe I can just ask for help anyway.
And he actually quite likes helping me.
It's something he feels he can do,
So it's all good.
So that's the second thing.
Firstly it's slowness,
Secondly is asking for help and thirdly I feel this extreme gratitude for my body and my life.
It takes something like a sore back to realise what an extraordinary mechanism my body is.
It makes me realise that the things that I do take for granted,
The movements and my capacity to do things,
I realise deeply what a wonderful machine this body is,
This flesh and blood that is part of our makeup.
And it's so easy to take good health for granted.
And this is a reminder for me to be grateful for the bits of me that work so well.
Sure my back is not so good at the moment,
But all the other parts of my body are working well and I am healthy at the moment.
And it's given me time to take stock and just be grateful,
Deeply grateful for my body and deeply grateful for my psychological system.
You see I understand something about the way life operates.
I understand we are the source and spiritual energy of life itself and having a human experience we get lost in thought and thinking.
I deeply understand that and I am so grateful for that understanding too.
It means that I navigate through life aligning myself with how life works rather than trying to make life work a certain way.
And I am aligning myself with the way my body is working at the moment and taking things slowly.
So the three things I am deeply grateful for with this sore back is firstly taking things slowly,
Secondly asking for help and just thirdly taking stock and being grateful for all the things in my life that bring me joy.
