Good morning and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
You can probably hear I'm right down on the shoreline of the Firth of Forth.
I'm in Scotland and it's a calm day.
I'm very close to the water's edge and I can see the ripple,
The gentle ripple of water on this soft grey,
Very inviting sea.
It's a warm day,
A lovely temperature,
A soft temperature,
Everything feels quite soft in this light and I can see on the edge of the rocks there's a fisherman out fishing,
A solitary fisherman,
Sort of silhouetted.
It looks very much like he's part of the landscape and the birds are flying across the water and on the rocks.
It feels,
It feels very much like it's just me in the world.
And today is a little,
Just a reminder I suppose,
Of what it is like when we are going along swimmingly in life and then we just come across something that trips us up.
And the message today is,
Is one of just being aware and being kind to yourself.
Yesterday we went for a bike ride.
We were cycling as much as possible on quiet roads and on one occasion we found our way to a track that was very close to the sea edge and mainly it was quite bumpy and stony and you could see the sand as well in the track.
And as we were cycling along,
Bumping our way along,
Relaxed and happy and not really paying too much attention to what we were cycling on,
Suddenly the wheels pretty much stopped dead of the bike and I'd cycled into some very soft,
Soft sand and immediately my whole body tensed up and I thought I was going to fall off the bike but luckily no,
I was able to keep going and very quickly I was back onto that solid ground again.
But I was much slower then as I was cycling along because I realised that the nature of the path was one that was both stony and sandy and I needed to be quite alert and go slowly to make sure I didn't come a cropper.
And I just thought,
I just thought when I got back onto the roads again and the cycling became much more steady and easy,
I just thought well isn't that interesting?
On a bike ride we absolutely know that we just pace ourselves according to the terrain,
It's obvious.
If it's hard under,
I say underfoot,
Under the wheel,
We slow down,
We make allowances,
We just allow ourselves to be safe as we cycle and if it had been,
If necessary,
I would have got off the bicycle and pushed for a little while.
And it feels so similar to life in a way.
We carry along at a pace in life and there are times,
Unexpectedly,
Things happen and they nearly knock us over and the the nature of life,
I suppose,
Is two things is to say.
One is that,
You know,
The nature of life is that that will happen,
So it's not to get angry at life for things happening because that is the nature of what it is to be alive.
And the second thing to realise is that when we do come up against tough stuff,
It's just to slow down,
Slow down and adjust our pace,
Accommodate our pace to what's going on around us.
So that,
In essence,
Is what I want to share with you today is firstly,
Just be be kind to yourself if you need to slow down and secondly,
Just accommodate yourself and pace to whatever is going on around you.
Sometimes we do need to slow down and to take things a little bit more carefully.
