Just about at the centre, partly hidden by reeds, a parent swan and cygnet. One of the parent birds disappeared over the summer, but we're always uplifted in seeing these two making their way through the winter.

It was W H Vanstone who nearly 50 years ago in Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense, made me think more deeply about how we become invested in that which we love and labour over, and how over time we are shaped by that in which we invest our lives.

You could walk past this lochan any day, watch the various waterfowl, then walk on till the next time. But once you stop to look, to imagine the precarious early weeks of a cygnet, to watch it grow stronger, swim more independently, it begins to matter that it should flourish, grow and come to be just what a swan is made to be.

It's such attentiveness to life and the individual lives around us, a cultivated caring about outcomes for people, animals and our living world, that can help us back to the place where we confer value and worth on each life as God-given gift – and invest in life and the lives around us as gifts for which we bear personal responsibility, a duty of stewardship care, if you will. Or so it seems to me