Vacation Stress and New Perspectives

It's vacation time! So many of us plan for it and hold it up like a trophy reward for making it through the daily mundane days in life: washing clothes, making egg salad sandwich or watching one more reality TV show.

But really, does it refresh you?

Do you long for more time when you are away?
Do you regret the time when you realize you spent more than planned?
Do you quickly forget what it felt like when you re-enter your home?

In my family, I have a quirky problem...my children do not want to be photographed. They dunk, hide, turn or firmly shut their eyes. Facebook and other computer photo pages have them horrified of getting a bad picture taken and plastered for everyone in the world to see.

I so long to have pictures to see, OK yes, I am getting older... I need pictures to remember. And then I wonder, is everyone else like me?

Do people need to see pictures to recall the memories or can they pull up images in their head? The images I see in my head are all kinda warped with new angles and scenes created by artistic cubist painter. My mental filing system is a little off.

Sometimes I wish I could live in a vacation mode... do you?

The morning after I arrived home from our wonderful vacation on the beach in Destin, FL I had a perfect dream to help me land back into reality of wife/mom/individual/etc:

I was in this hallway of doors.

I would open a door and be working on a big important project -- like doing surgery on some old guy or heading up a creative team with a project 2 weeks overdue or practicing a dress rehearsal for a big show or doing a layout on a magazine...

Everything had deadline, and it was pressing on me....so....

I would run from room to room doing about 5 minutes of work and dart out for the next room. Can you imagine leaving a patient after a few minutes to run to the next project? I was spinning, overwhelmed and guilt-ridden. And then the telephone began to ring. Really--in real life-- our phone rang and work me up.

But here is the wildest part, my husband started to speak and I told him to wait, I was still able to re-enter the dream. After a minute or so (I think my EMDR therapy helped me with the ability-awake dreaming), I was back in watching... half/half drowsy/awake. And then it came to me, the moral of the dream... I am doing too much!

Everything I do is important, urgent, special -- but because I do so many things I am never competing anything!!! After a few more minutes of trying to let the dream show me how to solve this problem, I had no success, so I woke up.

God was teaching a strong lesson. 

Finish a project before you look for or take on another one.

Where do I begin? I have a deadline on June 1st! I have an article to turn into a magazine editor. I will finish that article before I go looking for other things or digging into other piles.

Pray for me, I tend to get distracted and anything that looks interesting becomes "just what I have been waiting for" which ends up derailing me.

Seriously, I do need your prayers, so I will begin by praying to God for my focus and to guide my research to not lead me on any rabbit trails (if only I distasted research).

Here I go! (as soon as I find the perfect picture for this post and proof it and publish it).