Transcript

The Clover Leaf · Wanzology

The Clover Leaf Friends, Romans, countrymen, and women. Hi. Hey, what's going on? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!! I am your host, The Wanz, and happy to be here, happy that you're here, happy that the world has not fallen off its axis quite yet, and so far this country hasn't been destroyed by you-know-who. We won't go into that. So, if you're on a freeway and you're heading northbound on whatever freeway that is, and you come to an overpass and it says, "Take this exit if you wanna go west," or, "Take this exit if you wanna go east," or, "Continue right on through." I was thinking about the shape of that particular traffic pattern. If you're heading north and you decide to take the exit that will head you to the west, and you get off on that exit, it curves you around and then you'll be pointed west. What happens if right when you're pointed west, you wait, "Oh, I need to go south." So you'll take the next exit, which actually is an entrance, you'll curve around, and you'll be heading towards the south. But wait, I wanted to head east, so you immediately take that exit ramp, and it curves you around and you're heading to the east. But wait, I'm not sure. So you take the entrance ramp, go around, and then you're heading north again, and you've gone in a big circle. In the '70s, that was, like, a huge thing, the cloverleaf pattern. If you were going the wrong direction, all you had to do was circle back and you could be going the way you needed to go. You just had to go back up and around to get whatever entrance ramp would head you in the direction you wanted to go. For traffic, that's fine and dandy. But what if it's thinking that you're having an issue with? What if your thought process goes in the shape of a cloverleaf, and you go up the exit and you come around, but you gotta take the first entrance ramp, and you go down, and you have to take the exit, and it takes you up and around, but you gotta take the first entrance ramp, and all of a sudden you're heading back exactly the way you came. You end up going in a circle. What spurred this is I was thinking of a song that I wrote a long, long, long time ago called Stranded. The first verse goes like this: “So confused, naive beginnings end up feeling used. Disregarded warnings and misread clues To a destination never clearly viewed, never fully realized. Was it right to act as if and keep headed toward the light? So distant, yet so close to feeling right. It's hard to see the circle while you walk a straight line Thinking everything is fine.” And it's that last line, "It's hard to see the circle when you walk a straight line thinking everything is fine." I thought about if you're out anywhere, like on the beach, if you make a circle wide enough, it just looks like a straight line. You're just walking in a straight line, even though from the air or from a distance, you can see that you're going in a circle. I get thought patterns like that. I seem to reinforce the theory that life is cyclical, meaning that similar things happen the same way, but they come dressed differently. They approach you differently, so you don't see them and can't connect them to the similar situation which is in the past. I use this analogy, you're walking around a tree in the woods in the snow, and you're all by yourself. And as you're walking, all of a sudden you see footprints, and you start to get a little excited. You, you get excited, and you start picking up the pace a little bit and following the footprints, and then all of a sudden there's two sets of footprints, and you get excited! So you push the pace a little more, and you're going faster, and when you come around, there's three sets of footprints! And that's about when you figure out that you've been going in a circle and those tracks are all yours. That's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about a cloverleaf. Cloverleaf thought pattern. You go one way up an exit and it turns you around, but you think you need to go another direction so you take the first entrance ramp that you see and it brings you down towards the freeway, you're heading the opposite way, but you need to take the first exit and it brings you up and around so that you're heading another way, but you gotta take the first entrance ramp to get back on the freeway and you're ending up going exactly where you were before It sounds very confusing. I wish I had a picture. Sometimes life, for me, feels that way. One great big circle. Not getting any younger, not gaining any more knowledge, not really advancing along the, the river of life. Just kinda, kinda meandering in a circle. It's annoying when you get this realization because to me it seems like I'm making progress. Every day is different even though they end in ‘Y’, every single day ends in Y’’, it feels different. Like Tuesday. Tuesday this week does not feel like Tuesday last week, and it's probably not gonna feel like Tuesday next week, but it'll still be a Tuesday, if that makes any sense at all. My point is, we human beings can pretend to be so smart, so bloody in the know, we don't realize how bad and how often we're fooling ourselves. We're fooling ourselves thinking that we are ‘not enough’ of something or another, that we don't have what another person has and that makes us ‘less than’, or we feel like we don't wanna engage with other people for fear they might find out who we are really, because if they knew, they wouldn't like us. Yet when you go out into the world, everything's cool. You're a cool bird, you're hanging out with cool birds, everybody's cool, bird. It's weird, but after you've hung out with these people, done a bunch of things, and you're back by yourself, sometimes you ask yourself, "What just happened? Where was I? What was I doing? What was going on? What happened?" This is what I'm talking about. This is what I'm talking about when I say your life can be going in a circle, and that circle being so wide that it looks like a straight line. It looks like you're going from A to B when in fact you've gone from A to W, and then you see X, Y, Z, and then A is back again, because you've gone in a big circle. When this happens to me, I get frustrated. I get confused and frustrated because I KNOW full well I didn't start out this way. I know full well what my destination was going to be, so it's confusing to me how I end up in a position where I haven't really gone anywhere or done anything. That's when I'm really, really frightened, because it feels like I'm wasting time. And as we all know, time is the most valuable thing we have for two reasons. One, you can't replace it. Once a moment is gone, it's gone. And two, nobody knows how much they have. So you have to spend your time wisely. When you're in the heat of the moment of doing something, how do you know that your time is being well spent? How do you know you're spending your time wisely, hmm? I know I don't know. I'm not sure. I really, really don't know. What I do know is that when a person is in touch with themselves, they're aware of every little change that happens. Every little feeling, every little tremor, every little nudge, change in air pressure. Some people are very sensitive, like that aunt you have that says, "Oop, my knee hurts. It's gonna rain.", and then it does. Some of us are not as observant. Some of us think, "Oh, that's... What happened? What happened? No, really, what happened? What really happened? I'm not sure." There are some of us who go, "What are you talking about? I don't understand. This doesn't make any sense to me.", and everywhere in between. If you don't understand, that's probably best, 'cause all I'm talking about is on the road of life, it always seems like you're in the same place, even though you're doing your best to move forward towards whatever destination you're going toward. Could be the store, could be another college degree, could be having a child, could be finding that spouse. Doesn't matter what the destination is, what matters is what you're thinking when you're on your way to the destination. Some destinations aren't easy to find. Some destinations are camouflaged. They're camouflaged to look like exactly what you're doing right now. That's what they are. So it looks like you're making a lot of progress when in fact you're not really doing anything. You're putting out all this energy and expending all this thought trying to, ugh, move forward, push the peanut across the bridge, and you really haven't gone anywhere or done anything when you step back a little bit and look at your progress. It can be discouraging. Have you ever noticed that? Have you ever felt this way before? Felt like you're pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it, and no matter how much water you put in, the bucket never fills I feel like this, I feel like this more than I am comfortable with. And I know I'm just thinking, more than likely I'm overthinking, because life is not that complicated. The cloverleaf thought pattern is only confusing if you're not sure which direction you are ‘supposed’ to go, and ‘supposed to’ means something different for everybody. Which way is gonna be the fastest way? Which way is going to be the most scenic way? Which way has more people around it so that you're not by yourself? And which way is completely and totally the wrong direction? Well, in the cloverleaf scenario, you don't know until you either rejoin the path that you originally came from or you've gone a long ways in another direction and you're not finding what you thought you were going to find. Not being lost, just finding new ways to get there, but you realize that you went the wrong direction. So do you find another cloverleaf and circle around until you're heading back the opposite way? Or do you try to head the same general direction you were heading before, let's call it north, and you're on a stretch of thought that's heading east. So you have to, you have to take a left, basically. How do you take that left? Well, you get on the entrance ramp that takes you north. And if that doesn't work, you take the entrance ramp that takes you west or south, depending on where you're trying to get to. If you're not careful, you'll find that you're just going in circles, and you're really not going anywhere or doing anything except wasting time. I'll close with this. My father had a really cool saying about this particular subject. He said, "Make sure you know the difference between wasting time and treading water." Make sure you know the difference between wasting time and treading water. At first glance, that just seems really obvious, but then he imparted on me that when you're treading water, your head's above the water, you're looking around to see where you were, where you are going, and where you're at. So you're basically finding your direction. Are you heading towards the destination you thought you were heading for? Are you swimming further out to sea instead of towards the shore? Because you only have so much energy. If you run out of energy, you'll drown. So if you're ‘dilly-dallying’ around and, oh, I think it might be this way and might be that way, and then you stop and you notice how tired you are, you have just wasted time because you didn't have a direction. You didn't have a destination. If you're just sitting around pulling the petals off a daisy,’ loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not’, or you're on the fifth level of a game that you've played for years and you're going through it again for the fourth time, you already know what to do. That's not constructive, you're not learning anything. If you're playing the same chords on the guitar or the piano and you're not doing anything to alter the chords to maybe give you a different perspective on how they sound, or maybe this will be the eighth or ninth day in a row that you've had pizza with exactly the same toppings. Nobody eats pizza every day. Nobody. Not with the same stuff on top. The difference between ‘wasting time’ and ‘treading water’. Treading water is useful. Wasting time isn't. Make sure that you know the difference. You'll have to work it out for yourself because I can't tell you how to do it, I can just kind of give you a little guidance on what to do. And that's what this podcast is kind of all about. I go through things and I'm not the only one, so I talk about them. And thanks to you, I have someone to talk to. So with that being said, don't be moving around in circles. Make sure that you know where you're going. And for heaven's sakes, go with someone. I'm a firm believer in the buddy system, a’ight. Thanks for tuning in. Take care of yourself, I'll talk to you later!! Bye.