NPR - 4 am conversations

I'm sure you may be asking, "Huh?" It's a fair question to ask who has conversations at 4:00 am, except at all-night diners or at home with friends after some event, and especially with yourself? Well, I do, and sometimes it's when I'm at my clearest thinking because I'm not thinking. Another, "Huh?" Ok, I'll, hopefully, explain.

I'm one of those people who, as the person said, "I'm just not a night person." I'm a morning person, much to my chagrin with friends who are late night people, and find me often just getting through the night with them half asleep. But I often wake up around 4:00 am with something on my mind. So I make coffee and go sit on the deck to watch and hear the sounds of the night, the trains across the Narrows Strait going to Seattle or Portland, the boats and ships going through the Strait, planes flying in and out of SeaTac Airport, the weather, especially the wind in the trees, and everything else that happens in the dark.

While many people like the company of others, I like the comfort of being alone in a place to just be and experience, in short the saying, "Stand in your own space and know you are there." And the days I wake up with something I've been thinking about in my dreams, I like to put my active mind in neutral and let it conduct a conversation with itself, letting the left and right brains have a conversation. This takes practice you because you innately want to keep trying to think, but the key is not to think and let things happen.

You see, your left brain is the more analytical side and the right side the more artistic side, and your left the more decisive side and the right the more brainstorm side for ideas and choices, so the conversations often are the internal banter of your thinking, while you're quietly listening to the conversation. The goal is to just relax and listen, let your mind go through the conversation, and if all goes well you reach a concensus, something that both thinks and feels right.

It's like this on some mornings and sometimes if you're lucky, the light on the eastern horizon begins to split the darkness along the edge of life and on the horizon, slowly turning the sky from deep red to yellow to blue. And if I'm really lucky some mornings when Mt. Rainier is out, you get the sunrise behind it, to make the morning well worth the early mental wake up call to greet the day.