Artistic Temperment

As soon as you accept the idea that you are in control of your
thoughts you will be able to create your own happiness.

When I try to classify where it is I fall on the spectrum of "personality type", I always have a hard time. Partly because I get the sense, say, if I'm trying to describe myself, that I'm all over the place, which really, depending on whom I'm interacting with and where, I am.
It's kind of like those quizzes you sometimes complete in a magazine that you might read at the gym, you fill it in with your head, you're on the elliptical and you don't have a pen. If you get this many "D's" you are a gregarious, instantly-befriending type; if you get a certain amount of B's you are shy, retiring, and someone who never goes after what they want; if you amass a bunch of A's, you are a go-getter, ruthless, a true "type A".
So my personality type is part type A, with that 'get it done' instinct, but then I have a thoughtful dreamer thrown in there too. Over-sensitive to the plights of this world? That's me, too.
So describing myself in any realm is never that simple.
The day began at 5 am, because this is the time my mind decided to wake the rest of me up, ready or not, to think about things that are best left alone.
My boyfriend's step mom summed up what one needs to do when niggled with those mind-gone-wild thoughts at 4, 5am, and it's this: "Let the thoughts just drift away like a leaf blowing in the wind." It sounds SO amazing, so simple, so d0-able, and yet, unlike the lovely quote that heads this post, at 5 am I HAVE NO CONTROL. It starts with the Next Day, as in what do I have to do the Next Day, or, at 5 am, That Day, and why I can't control my mind, or at least corner it into pretending to think positively. No leaf blowing was going to happen.
I turned to the state of the desparate, trying to get a few more precious minutes, minutes, I'm saying, of sleep. I decided to count sheep. Not just any sheep. The clay-mation sheep from the Serta ads, that look so forlorn on the commercials, when the person gets a new mattress and no longer needs the clay-mation sheep. Well, I needed them. I tried to count them all, their sad, forlorn faces imprinted on my brain from the ads.
Guess what? Yea. Yup.
NOTHING.
So I saw this quote today on a 'positive thinking' website, and it seems so ...easy. But I sometimes have trouble controlling my own thoughts. They've controlled me for so long. Listening to a church sermon at the baptism of a good friend's little baby on sunday, the minister said something that really struck me: "No amount of worrying will add even one hour to your lifespan". It was almost like what Oprah defines as one of her "aha" moments. I literally have used worry as a shield for years, decades, eternities. And the minister is right. Time will march on, fate will chalk up what it wants, your life will unfold, streets into streets on the folds of the map of where you're going, taking whatever route it wants, ending up in the same destination. That is, where you're meant to be. Do you have a say in it? To some extent, yes. Meaning, you get to decide where you turn left or right. But, as I mentioned to a friend in a conversation of "discourse" the big decisions in life are sometimes made for you--meaning, you don't make them, so they make themselves. All those big things, the ones that you mull over at 5 am, are things that occupy your deeper mind, where, no matter what, you aim to meet your number one need, whatever that might be. Work-related, love-life, or that crazy idea that just won't go away.
In the daylight, waking hours, you can shelve what you think you may really need to do, at the time, but maybe, at 5 am, it's when the real thinking is going on.
There's no hiding from inside your own head at that time of the morning, let me tell you.