It is amazing to me how the terror of a nightmare can be quashed when it switches to a lucid dream. This doesn’t happen often but when it does, I think, “This is a dream.” That typically ends the dream pretty quickly. Sometimes, I am not fully lucid but I start thinking during the dream, “This can’t really happen. This is not a real threat.” At these times, rational thought enters the dream and it becomes much less scary. In both of these instances, it is as if I am observing the dream while also experiencing it.

It occurred to me this morning that when the most stressful and scary parts of my life seem most bearable, it is a similar experience to a lucid nightmare. I am able to observe the situation, mindfully, while still being connected with the experience. This is the main way, in my view, that mindfulness is different from coping strategies such as rationalizing, intellectualizing, or denial. There is still a connection to emotion, thought, and experience.

A most important advantage of this lucidity has been that it helps me step back from an all consuming chasm of pain and suffering to a larger view of reality, one that includes joy, happiness, and hope.

“Shit happens.” Most of us have if not heard that expression, have experienced it. Even when bad things take a long time to happen, they can hit us like a train wreck. Cancer was like that for me.

Healing can take an awfully long time.

But it can happen.

I am still planning to make a book out of my blog posts and photographs. I joked to my husband, “I don’t know why I haven’t finished already. I mean the photos are already taken and the writing is all done.”

He replied, “The writing’s not done.”

“Yes, it is. I just need to decide what posts will include, in what order, and what photos to put in.” (Not exactly, I actually do have some new writing to do. But I digress.)

“Well, you need to edit it. You have at least one misspelled word in every post.”

Well, of course I am planning to proofread my writing. Believe it or not, I see the misspellings and the typos quite frequently, too. They are a lot easier to spot AFTER I’ve published a post. It’s not just because time has elapsed since the writing of the post, either. I can actually spot them better on the published post than in the WordPress writing editor. It’s something about the font size and the color contrast.

I am not a consistently good speller. If I am tired, it’s worse. If I am surrounded by family activities and chores, it’s worse. And these are the times, my friends, when I write my posts.

I am also not a professional writer. Actually, let me rephrase that. I am actually not a professional proofreader, copy editor, or editor. I am a well educated woman who blogs. That is all. I don’t have a writing degree. I have no staff or publishing house. Also, I don’t care enough to proofread my work before I post it. I learn a lot in the actual writing of each piece and then I let it go.

I can, however, turn it out when I need to do so. Part of my job is testing children with learning disorders, which involves reading and scoring their writing samples according to a standardized rubric. They are short samples and I can find the errors in writing mechanics, grammar, and syntax as well as credit students for using detail, examples, paragraphs, and transition words to organize and develop the themes of their essays.

Some of the “kids” I test are actually college students. Many of the students I test are very smart and work very hard. And you know what? My writing is about 5000 times better than most of them, even accounting for age.

Most people are not great writers, from a technical standpoint. However, most people have something to say. They may have not mastered the medium, but they have a message. This is one of my jobs as a child/adolescent psychologist; I need to use active listening to understand the message.

When children start school, they quickly learn that the “good” kids know answers and have good manners. They are good at school. This carries on in life, with some complications in adolescence, when goodness means “popular” and popularity is defined differently at different schools as well as by individual subcultures of students within a given school. It’s fair to say though that it is pretty much considered a negative for students to fail school.

Recently, I attended a meeting, during which a special education teacher, told a high school student with rather severe learning disabilities, “You are not a test score. You are not defined by grades.”

This student tries really hard and has received additional support for many years. And still, she is having an incredibly difficult time passing classes.  I knew that the intention of the teacher was very positive. But in high school, students ARE defined to a significant degree, by test scores and grades. It is asking a lot from a teen or any person, who is failing over and over at a major part of life, to separate their self-worth from their efficacy in life.

It also doesn’t help that as educated people, we can sometimes bully others based on the way they express themselves rather than simply disagreeing with their message. This is often done in political arguments. For example, a member of the Tea Party carries a sign at a rally that contains a spelling error. We point out the error and say, “What an idiot.”

I have made statements like this many times in my life. I have made fun of people with different viewpoints based on their communication errors, whether spoken or written. A few years ago, I made a concerted effort to stop doing this. It’s not that I NEVER do it, but it is much reduced.

Our country has major problems in the way that it is governed. We have a system that seems to pride itself on fighting all of the time and getting nothing done.  People do it in their day to day life, too. It’s as if we chip away at each other, makes lists of errors, treating the very tiniest like they are the most grievous possible. Because we disagree with someone. Often we disagree because we do not believe the person to be kind or just and somehow this gives us a free pass for being unkind and unfair in return. Hurt and fear often underlie these kind of angry responses. I know for myself, I sometimes use anger to justify why my unkind treatment is deserved. I am trying to do this less and less.

I don’t know how to solve these problems but I can choose to try my best to not be part of them.

I have moved many times in my life. At one point, my husband and I had lived in three states in the span of 15 months, North Carolina, Florida, then Indiana. These states ARE NOT close together, I might add. By the time we moved to Indiana, I would be driving down the street and forget what city I was in. Was the main street Franklin? Walnut Street? 15th?

There was the packing, the finding a new place, the adjusting. It still surprises me that we moved to North Carolina sight unseen, ten days before our graduate programs started, and without having found an apartment ahead of time. But North Carolina is on the opposite side of the country from Washington. We did not have the time or money needed for visits ahead of time.

Now I have to move my business. We’re moving just a few blocks away. I spent a great deal of time and money making my current office just the way I wanted it. I took an entire week off from work. My husband also took an entire week off to help me. We cleaned, painted, and I decorated and furnished it. It really is a beautiful office. I knew I would not stay there forever. It is an old building on land ripe for development. But I thought I would be able to stay there considerably longer.

Moving is time consuming, a lot of work, aggravating, and expensive. For reasonable reasons, it made sense for me to take the lead in the move. I hold the lease to both our current space and the new one, for example. I am the only one who lives near the offices. I am also the only one who does not have young children. And I tend to be good at organizing things.

It is reasonable for me to take the lead in this but I must admit that it makes it makes it harder given that I don’t want to move. We are moving earlier than we have to (we have seven months remaining in our current lease) for reasonable reasons. But again, despite the fact that our decision is reasonable, it makes it hard that I don’t want to move.

We will be paying over twice as much rent. I will be getting an office that is very nice but not as nice as the one I have. That makes it hard. My office mates will be getting nicer offices than they have presently. That makes it easier for me. I feel better that overall, this is an improvement for our group.

The other consolation is that I am taking the lead in decorating the common areas. I love decorating and this is the one thing to which I am looking forward in this whole process, besides being happy for my office mates’ enthusiasm for moving.

One of my friends very nicely told me that he wanted to hear about my move. I told him, “It is boring and aggravating.” I am such a grump. But this is how I feel for the most part. I manage to be mostly cheerful because the alternative is worse. But I am working hard to maintain an upbeat attitude on top of other things in my life. My husband is having physical problems. He is having a great deal of back pain. This has been a chronic issue. A few years ago, he was bedridden for three weeks. Early last week, he fell flat on his back when getting onto the bus. The driver pulled out quickly and ran over the curb. John was unable to get up for over a full minute, an ambulance was called, and he was examined by an EMT. He did not go to the hospital but has been in a great deal of pain ever since then despite regular massage, acupuncture, and muscle relaxing pain medication.

Life can be really stressful. And then you have to pick up and move. And then maybe we get to stick around in a comfortable spot for awhile.