The Wisdom Of Going With The Flow - October 22

Going against the flow of life can make everything feel harder than it needs to be. In today’s 5 Minutes In Nature, Liz is asked to help out unexpectedly, which leaves her feeling a little frustrated that she can’t follow her original plans. She soon realises this is a gentle reminder of how much easier life becomes when we go with the flow, rather than trying to force things in a different direction.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott. Sitting on a step in my mum's garden in Exeter and I'm just looking down over the grass which is a wonderful green colour. It got very dry and brown in the summer and the leaves at the end of the garden on the trees are falling gently down. This is autumn still doing its thing, Or as the Americans say fall, The fall where all the leaves fall down. I think it's such a good way to describe autumn and today is a reflection on, I guess it's about the way life works out and whether or not I go with it or against it. So do you go with life or do you kind of want to take life in a different direction and I'm going to explain a bit more. So I'm helping looking after my mum and I'm actually doing my brother a favour who was meant to be looking after my mum but he's not been too great and he's a bit incapacitated so I've come up to help out. What's happened is that the day and the week which was meant to go one way I had some ideas on how I was going to be spending my week and what I was going to be doing in the well those plans changed because when I come up and look after my mum it's quite a lot to do. It's not difficult but there's a lot of you know cups of tea and feeding and washing up and getting the washing done and changing bedding and all of that kind of thing. There are jobs to do so whereas when I am at home and I can just sit down and get on with whatever I need to that day when I'm up my day is dictated with several things that need to get done during the day and today I in particular I wanted to finish off some work that I wasn't able to do during the week because I've been helping out my mum and I thought the day was going to go one way and I've had conversations with my brother who is really keen to see mum and it would mean me taking my mum over to see him and she'd like to see him too and then I'm trying to accommodate my husband who wants to come up and see me and see my brother and and trying to work out timings and suddenly the the little block of time that I had earmarked for myself a sort of two or three hour block I can see just disappearing now like water through my fingers or sand through my fingers it's like I just don't think it's going to happen and it reminds me of something it reminds me of what it is to try and make life go in a particular direction when actually life is taking you in a different direction and it reminds me of a time I was actually with my husband we were visiting California and it was I think it was Los Angeles or near there but along the beach there was this boardwalk and you could cycle along it and we hired some bikes one day and we cycled along it and we loved it and then the next day we thought we'd hire a tandem so this is one bike where you've got two people pedaling and we thought we'd give it a go we'd never given it a go before and it looked like good fun so we started out my husband was on the front I was on the back and we got into the rhythm of it and it was a bit of fun and then I said great can I have a go now at being on the front and you go on the back and let's see what that's like well things got very different when my husband was on the back because he found it so difficult to allow me to take the lead he instinctively was trying to guide the bike from the back seat where in actual fact when you're on the back seat of a tandem you've got to trust the person who's at front in the front steering and you've just got to facilitate and pedal and go in the direction that that person is taking you in so it didn't last very long with me at the front of this tandem because as soon as we started pedaling he was trying to steer from the back to take me in a particular direction whereas in actual fact I was trying to take the bike in a different direction and that's a bit like what it feels like with the life at the moment just today is like I really want to go in one direction and yet it feels as though life is trying to steer me in a different direction and what I've learned is that the best thing to do is to go in the direction that life is taking me that's the best thing to do that doesn't mean I don't have boundaries it doesn't that I don't earmark time for myself it's just that sometimes life says this is the direction of travel and rather than try and do a bit of backseat driving I've just got to go with the direction that life wants to take me

Reviews

Thanks Liz 🙏🏼
I find this one difficult, having a set plan and others using up my time. Frustrating is what I think of. And then ‘more of a boundary’
I feel like I have to do that thing immediately and what I need to do is set a boundary and say “ I can’t do it now, however I am happy to help at 4 o’clock “ etc. thanks for the reminder.
🌿🙏🏼🌿

I just love "going with the flow" as most of the things in life don't happen the way we want them to. So instead of feeling mad or anxious, I just kee on going to find out about what life has in store for me.
Thanks for reminding me of the beauty of that!

I have had a very similar tandem experience! 😂 But more importantly, very often my days do not go the way I had planned, so I appreciate your encouragement to simply go with the flow instead of getting upset and trying to continue fighting my way upstream. Thanks Liz! 😇🙏🏻