What is your life’s ecosystem?
Today’s forest therapy walk was a rather short one. I arrived at the park at around 6:00pm and I only spent about an hour and a half there. I spent the first part of my park experience brisk walking and the last 20 minutes or so meditating on the task I set out to do for today. The task today is to reflect on and nurture my internal ecosystem. An ecosystem is a network of interconnected beings working together. Within an ecosystem, every living thing plays an important role in maintaining the balance of environment. It’s the same for our life. Our life is maintained and sustained by many an internal ecosystem of interconnected elements: our faith, our belief system, our value system, family, friends, partner, career, etc. How are they coming together to cultivate a happy and healthy mind? What can I do to make sure that I have a balanced life?
More often than not, we have to determine ourselves what actually form up our internal ecosystem? For me faith, family, my partner and work form up the main bulk of my international ecosystem. The challenge is to how to adjust their connectedness with me to help to maintain a balance. For example, more of faith and less of career, or more of family and partner and less of friends. For me, faith got to be the centre of everything. Currently, what’s more important to me are my family members and partner. Work is not exactly my priority any longer. Once we are able to adjust and re-adjust all these elements in our internal ecosystem, we will be able to find a more balanced and heathy mental life. It’s some sort of adjusting our priority in life and what should come first and what should come later. They all work together in some degree or another to make the whole of you.
Nature is always able to make such an adjustment and find a balance for it to survive in this world. In a natural ecosystem, there is always enough of every elements to keep every living things within the ecosystem alive and well. Once that balance is disrupted, that’s when chaos and disorder happen. The question we should always ask ourselves are:
Are we spending too much time at work and not spending time with people that matter?
Are we too lonely and there is a need to have a life-long companion? Having another person will certainly balance things up.
Are we having too much fun and neglecting our professional duty?
Is procrastination a problem with ourselves and we need to adopt a set of more dynamic life values and attitude?
These are just some questions and the list can go on. if you are still not too sure about what’s in your internal ecosystem, perhaps it’s time for you to delve into a park or a forest, start taking a slow walk and dig deeper within you and see what are the things that are crucial to you and how are you managing them?
Ronneth
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