To Nature – My Best Teacher

Today I was scanning my mailbox, looking for a specific email, when I came across an email I had written to a dear friend. It made me nostalgic and took me back to that rainy morning at my home town of Shillong. I remember exactly the reason why I had written all that to him.

A part of that email I thought I would share here as it reminded me of the fact that Nature is our greatest teacher. Nature has hundreds of life lessons for us, only if we choose to be her students. And, this is just one of those.

So, here it goes – an excerpt from the email that I had written to my friend.

This morning it rained, not heavy rains but good enough to drench you. Other days, I would have happily tucked inside the quilt and gone off to another round of blissful sleep. But today being the last day that I would walk these lovely roads, I stepped out with an umbrella. It was wonderful, hardly anybody around - the usual morning walkers I mean. I had the entire road and all the trees, the flowers, the ferns, and the greenery to myself. On the way back, I sat on a roadside culvert for a while just to soak in the surroundings which I will badly miss in Bangalore. After sometime, I closed my eyes for a while and concentrated on the sounds. The small and large raindrops falling on my umbrella, the birds of various kinds calling out, the brook behind me gushing away....every sound was distinctive, yet like a well-coordinated orchestra. It was music and it was beautiful. Nature is God! My mind was blank and I was thinking of nothing. Then something I had read somewhere about learning from nature came flashing by.....The brook behind me was gurgling away and it was the loudest sound at that point of time forcing my attention towards it. I thought to myself, doesn't it gurgle the same way whether it is a bright sunny day or a gloomy rainy day. What if it would say, "I am not upto myself today, I will not gurgle today. It's a gloomy day, let the sun shine and then we'll see." Shouldn't we strive to be like the brook in our daily lives? Good days and bad days will keep coming and the cycle of life will continue. Does that mean we pause in our path and stop doing what we do?

As I read this, I thought to myself if at all I practiced what I had preached. A few moments of deliberations and I think I do, but sometimes not always. The roller-coaster of a ride that life is, I hope I will remind myself to be resilient and patient like Nature is – always and NOT sometimes!

Author: neelstoria

Traveling, Gardening, Trekking, Hiking, Storytelling, Writing, Nature, Outdoors, Yoga, DIY

26 thoughts on “To Nature – My Best Teacher”

  2. Of course nature is the best teacher. It teaches everything, but without speaking a word. If one is attentive enough, alert enough, perceptive enough, sensitive enough, careful enough, one can learn all the lessons needed to lead a good life.

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  4. What a lovely idea: to be out somewhere you love, deliberately close your eyes, and immerse yourself in the soundscape. In a completely different way, it reminded me of someone I know who recorded an hour of Bombay street sounds for his wife, who, in Zurich, was missing her hometown badly.

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    1. That’s quite something else altogether 🙂
      And this reminds me of people who need fan to sleep at night not because of the cool air it circulates but for the sound that they are too used to 😀
      And some, like me, often don’t switch on the fan even if it’s really hot just because the sound irritates 😀

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  5. That is an amazing paragraph! It makes me ponder. Mother Nature: the giver, the forgiver, always. But for how long? What must she be thinking when we slaughter her other children so ruthlessly? Will she continue to condone what we do to our brethren? Will she keep disregarding our blatant disrespect towards her? I shudder to think of the answer…

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    1. Totally agree Narendra! She shows us what she’s capable of quite so often yet we just move on doing the same things as though nothing had never happened. We ought to shudder indeed given the things we continue doing!

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  7. You spoke your heart out…. and knowing you so well, i don’t think yourn’t close enough to practicing what you preach! Your love for nature, the euphoric you in finding that extra ordinary something from even the most common ones we generally ignore or fail to notice, makes you that special… u stand out from the crowd! Your mail ( or a part of it) to your friend is an amazing piece & I for sure, dont need to shout out ” Hey, you r an inspiring soul to all around you” ! All the best dear SIL, just keep on doing what u love! 🙂

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  10. Gurgling brooks in Shillong. *sniff* I sooo want to live there. Actually with remote working being the new norm, that might not be such a bad idea 🤔.. how’s the broadband internet there?

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    1. Internet isn’t that great and that’s the issue of working out of there. Though I have managed to work about 1-2 months from there but with the shoddy Internet and certain other issues, longer term could be troublesome.

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