Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and I'm sitting on a bench in front of a field that in the summer is a beautiful haze of golden grasses.
It's a wild flower meadow.
At the moment it's green,
There are dandelions,
The yellow flower poking up and yellow selendynes coming through as well but soon this will just be a raft of yellowy beautiful waving grass and the sharp contrast of different types of wildflowers that pop through that grass and there'll be yellows and purples and blues and reds.
It's a really beautiful field in the summer and I'm just sitting on a bench reflecting actually.
You might hear my dog panting in the background.
We're just having a little rest in the sun enjoying the blue sky.
I can look down and see the ocean in the distance.
It's probably about 10 miles away and it's reflecting the blue of the sky so it looks quite inviting down there as I look down to the ocean itself.
And today I'm just reflecting on the speed of life.
Like what is the speed of life?
On my walk earlier I bumped into someone who was on a bicycle.
I used to work with him at the BBC and I just was asking him about his journey on the bicycle,
Where he was going and why he was on the bike.
So this is like a push bike and he explained that he had had some time off work.
We had worked at the BBC probably about 20 years ago now I would imagine together and I left and started my business and he's carried on there and he was explaining that he'd had some time off work because he'd been seeing flashes of lights in his eyes and he'd gone to the doctor and his blood pressure was super high and the advice had been to get a bit more exercise and have a bit more balance in his life and that's what he'd done.
The bicycle was part of him having a bit of exercise in his life.
And as we were talking and as he was explaining the pace of his life it reminded me of the difference when I started out at the BBC as a radio reporter.
We used to record on tape and we would physically get a what was called a chinagraph,
Mark the tape,
Cut the tape and stick it back together again.
That's how you used to edit tape,
You'd physically cut it and over time it's been digitalised and he was explaining that you know there is so much digital work,
He needs to do so many apps that he just finds it quite hard to keep up.
And as we were talking it occurred to me that we often in life jump down the digital route as a way of speeding up a process in order we think to allow us a bit more time in our lives.
But actually all that seems to happen is that the more quick we get or the quicker that we get when it comes to for example digitally editing material the more we have to learn and the more we do.
It doesn't mean we have more space it just means that we do more.
Does that make sense?
It's the same I was reflecting on this when I was walking is that walking is two three miles an hour.
That's what we're designed to do and yet our lives are lived when we're travelling in cars and we can travel 60,
70 miles an hour when we're in a car.
When I'm walking it's two or three miles an hour that's it.
So what really occurred to me today as I was speaking to him and we were talking about the of walking and pilgrimage and slowing down is it's just a reflection that I don't think we're designed for this life this really fast life that's full of stuff and I don't think that necessarily it's good that we speed things up in order to supposedly have more time in life because invariably we don't have more time we just do more stuff.
So for me today as I'm reflecting on this bench with my beautiful old dog beside me just having a bit of time to reflect and contemplate on life and the speed of life it's just a realization that just because we've normalized life and just because I've normalized life that it's fast and I need to do things quickly that doesn't mean it's natural that's not a natural way to live and for me my reflection today is to really really reflect on the speed I want to live my life and to ask myself what speed is nourishing for me.
