Polaroid picture

 I’m finding the stress of my life cutting into my sleep. I seem to sleep long enough, but I can tell when I wake that I’ve been worrying about my responsibilities all night long.

With no school-aged children at home I often don’t follow weather forecasts. This morning I awoke before six a.m. vexed by a complicated issue. I got up to work on it on my laptop and when I glanced outside after about a half hour, something magical happened.

When I was a little girl I received a Polaroid camera for Christmas. (My granddaughter has a camera with the same technology.) I would take a picture and pull the seemingly blank photo paper from the camera. As I watched, a dim image in black and white would appear and details slowly sharpen before my eyes.

That’s what happened to me this morning. When I sat down at my desk, all seemed the same as yesterday. but at some point I turned my head to glance outside and realized the car seemed different. Peering down at the pre-dawn yard, I saw a blanket of white on my car. Over the next hour, each time I glanced out details of the scene deepened and sharpened into a wintry landscape. In the windless air a dusting of snow covered every maple twig. Since our coachhouse is white with grey trim, my west window framed an old black and white photo with a touch of dull brick in the Greeley Village apartments beyond and to the south a tinge of dusty pink at the office condos peeked through the branches.

David A. Bednar, an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spoke of "the tender mercies of the Lord," small blessings that we can learn to recognize and appreciate in our daily lives. As I sit here, wondering at the beauty that developed before my eyes this morning, it truly is a tender mercy. The stresses remain, the challenges abound, but there is beauty to be seen if I just lift my head and look.

My subconscious is my friend!

 I woke up Tuesday thinking, 'my subconscious is my friend.' Actually, I woke up remembering that I’d had a fitful night of sleep, waking several times during the night and realizing each time that I had been dreaming of editing DBSA Boston board meeting minutes. I didn’t remember details of the dreams, just the impression of spending all night puzzling out how to organize the minutes from the raw notes I had typed during the meeting as I struggled to keep up with the lively discussion.

But instead of adding the fact of my dreams to my stress level, I considered them in a different light. All night my subconscious was working on the minutes in many ways: multitasking in a way I could literally only dream of.

My minute-editing career had come to a crisis the week before. Through a series of events, 95% of which were of my own creating, I had to send a 4-month backlog of minutes to the board a few days prior to Monday’s monthly meeting.

Each month for several now I’ve promised myself to edit the minutes within two days of the meeting, while the discussions are fresh in my mind. With my current memory abilities, recall becomes much tougher as time passes.

And each month for several I’ve procrastinated and sent the minutes days before the next meeting rather than days after the previous.

Arising Tuesday morning with the new thought, that my subconscious is my friend, freed me to work on the edits of the Monday meeting with energy and confidence. My subconscious had attended that meeting and was hard at work processing it, not only the actual notes and memories but the emotional baggage and stress I've chosen to carry: all the resistances I have to sitting down and doing the task.

By Tuesday night I had emailed the draft of the minutes to my board members. And now I have 25 days to relax and enjoy and savor the experience of having a dreaded task completely, entirely, and utterly done. (And hope no one sends back any edits, I chuckle to myself.)