It's 4 a.m. - Do you Know Where Your Thoughts Are?

Mine...they were racing rendering sleep ever elusive. And so I got up and trudged down through the sleeping house to one of the family room couches. I plumped up my pillows and tucked in my blanket just so before crawling into my makeshift bed still hopefully hopeful for more shut eye. As I was trying to quiet my thoughts, all I could hear was noise after noise. The air was filled with the seconds tick tocking away on the clock in the room, the wind blowing through the fan below me sending it rattling, the furnace firing up, a battery in one of the smoke detectors sounding in warning that it is time to be changed, an i phone buzzing to let us know there is a message, the heaving and hoeing of tired floorboards, windows creaking, cats chasing and suddenly it struck me how every sound is amplified in the dark of the night. Every sound louder and every thought more worrisome. It is called the dead of night for a reason.

It got me to thinking about insomniacs. An occasional night of tossing and turning only gives me a glimpse at what they suffer through long night after long night. I know people who have bouts of insomnia, and one or two who are plagued by it chronically. I'm sorry that I've had too little sympathy for them. I've never gotten it in the same way that someone who hasn't lost a parent, cannot even come to know my grief. I'm not saying that they don't have true empathy and caring compassion, but they cannot fully fathom the weight that tugs at my heart or the pain that cuts to the core of my being. They just can't, and it works that way for a reason. The reason is called self-preservation.

One of the many things I was thinking of this too early morning was an unlikely book I came to own as a teenager. Unlikely because the book was called How It Feels When a Parent Dies, and I had two young and healthy parents. I was drawn to the book because one of the interviews was with two children who were eerily spitting images of my brother and I when we were their young ages. From the moment I saw the black and white photo, it haunted me and I had to have it. All these years I've held onto this erstwhile library book...it's traveled through life with me mostly untouched...unopened. In the dead of night, I cannot shake the feeling that this book is an antithetical talisman. I know it's not rational, and still I cannot let go of the feeling that destiny manifested itself all right. We are, after all, what we surround ourselves with...right?

And the energy we put out there comes back to us as we know from the Cosmic Law of Attraction. So it was today that I bumped into a babysitter we haven't seen or heard from in a couple years. I told her I had just been thinking about her. She told me, she had just been thinking about T. Bone. It was the middle of the school day in the middle of the week, but guess who was with me having lunch after an appointment? Yep...T. Bone. Coincidence? Perhaps, but I think rather not. This young woman tragically lost her mother a few years ago and I was wondering how she was faring knowing now what I didn't know then: how painfully difficult it is to be without your mother in this world. I can clearly remember the exact spot where she came to my mind only days before, and where I wished I had been of more comfort to her years ago, and days later our paths cross. I was able to give her that hug. Uncanny really. Yet I'm not unsettled by this kind of intersection, and I prefer to think of it less as chance and more as evidence of divine providence.

Well, the coffee is kicking in and I'm ready to start my day, which is probably not a bad idea seeing as how it is bound to be ending early.