I had a dream this morning just before Katie the dog woke me up at 5.

I had to give a talk to a group of people.  I didn’t know what the topic was but I was walking there carrying a cement planter filled with soil.  On top of the soil were some roses, some with short stems, some with longer stems.  I was going to put the roses in some sort of vases I hoped I could find when I got to my destination.  I was wearing black pants and a red shirt with a black sweater over it, and carrying a brown cardigan.  I thought I’d just put the brown cardigan on when I got there.  I was thinking about how to talk about family and garden no matter what the topic was that I was supposed to be speaking on.

Turns out the topic was supposed to be serenity.

So I’m at the venue and carrying this stupid cement planter and the roses are wilting so I set it down on one of the crowded long tables where there were little name plates assigning seats.  But all the tables are strewn with other people’s stuff and I can’t find my name.  I finally find the name of someone else at work, and I know she’s not coming so I decide to sit in her spot.  But my cement planter is now far off on another table and the roses look horrible so I leave it there, and go put on my brown cardigan over my black sweater and red shirt and black pants and I look in the mirror and the combination looks terrible so I’m taking off the sweaters and trying to get organized and think about what I can say about serenity when it’s my turn.

I walk back into the room tucking in my red shirt and say:

“How many of you have a stressful job?  Raise your hands.  Yep, me too.  I work in the mortgage industry.  If you looked up serenity in a dictionary on my desk the word wouldn’t even be in there.  So I ask you – what do you do to relax once you leave that stressful job?  Me?  I go work in the garden.  Well, it’s not really a garden per se, it’s pretty full of weeds, but if you go out and pull weeds for an hour and let your mind go blank you’ll relax and at the end you’ll have something concrete to show for it too.  I also travel.   Last week I went swimming.  Well, not really swimming exactly, we went to New Hampshire and the ocean was so cold I could only run in and out.  We went to visit my Aunt on my Dad’s side of the family.  She wasn’t home.  We knew she wasn’t going to be home but we went to visit anyway just to relax.  New Hampshire is serene.  I think my Uncle was serene before he died.  He was over ninety.  Husband’s aunt is going to be 99 this month and she seems serene too.  Maybe you learn to be that way the older you get.  Maybe as you age you really do learn not to let stuff get to you.  Maybe as the years go by the serenity piles up.   Maybe it’s not that I’m stressed, maybe it’s just that I’m too young to recognize serenity.  Maybe it’s an acquired skill.”

So.

Lesson learned from this dream?  Find some serenity today no matter how old or young you are.

And smell a rose along the way.

Katie says HI to everybody!

Wanna play?