Transcript

But What If? · Wanzology

But What If Da dum dum dum dum dong dong doh!! Dun dun dun dah!! Hey, what's going on? Welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of WANZ0LOGY!! I am your host, The Wanz, coming at you from what is soon to be a very warm and sticky Seattle, Washington. The whole city is on pins and needles. It's going to be over 90 degrees here in the city. It never really gets that warm. Translation: 80% of the people who live here do not have air conditioning. So when it gets to 85 or so, people start tripping a little bit. They really, really do. There's a lot of water around here, I mean, we have the whole Puget Sound to drown our sorrows in, so to speak, but here's the thing. Puget Sound's average water temperature rarely gets above 55 degrees, which is ch-ch-chilly!! It's very cold! There are some lakes that may get up to 67, 68 degrees, which is chilly, but nothing like being in the Sound, The Sound is fricking freezing. It's July and there's been drownings everywhere, and God help you if you're in a river. What's a river? It's melted snow!! Does it ever really get warm? No. So I try to stay out of the rivers unless I'm just, like, dipping a toe in it. They're very cool to stand by, let's put it that way. Standing next to a river is dope, but this is the time of year that they don't run very fast. Today, I was thinking about this contemplative thought, but what if? But what if? But what if it's a thing that we tell ourselves when we're looking at the next possible outcome. You want to zig, but what if you zagged? What if you wanted to have a chicken burrito, but what if you got a fajita instead? What if you passed on the chowder and had the cioppino? But what if? Most humans tend to do the ‘but what if’ exercise after they've already made a mistake. Say you're driving, you are looking at your navigation, and it says to turn left here 'cause you're gonna go about a third of a mile, and then you're gonna take a right, and then you'll get there. But you see that this other way would be faster if you took a right. But what if you took that right? Now, you have no idea if following the navigation that was suggested will get you where you wanted to be at a time that you wanted to be there. Following the navigation, you'd be there in twelve minutes. So now that you've not taken that direction and you're going on your own, what you ‘feel’, quote-unquote, what you ‘think’, quote-unquote, is the right way, will it take less than twelve minutes? Well, you're too busy trying to navigate because smaller streets, lower speed limit. Oh, look, there's a dead end. Oops. You get to where you're going, and you look back over which way did you come? Oh, yeah. What if you would have gone the way that it suggested? Would it have been easier? But what if is a very interesting little exercise to do, especially when you're looking at a menu at a restaurant. You have a taste for a salad, Caesar salad with chicken. Great!! So you find it, and then you see this other salad, but what about this apple walnut salad? What if I ate that? I like apples. I like walnuts. Spinach is in it. Ooh, it looks good! But so does the ribeye steak, and I don't really get ribeye steaks that often. So you play the ‘but what if’ game to try to figure out what decision you want to make, and that, my friends, is where you actually have power. You have power because you're going to make a choice. That is the superpower all humans have. So have you ever, like, taken apart your debate, the mental debate on what you're going to do next or what you'd like to do next? What was the objective? Well, I'd like to A, B, or C. So that means I'm gonna have to do one, two, or three. Well, which one am I gonna choose? Two? Does the order go two, three, one or two, one, three? What if I start with three and go back to one? What about three, two, one? See how it gets complicated? Each one of those is a ‘but what if’. But what if I... But what if I is the question. Now, when you get to the other side of ‘but what if I’ and you follow that, it reverses. But what if you would've made another choice? What would've happened if you would have done something differently? Well, since time only moves forward and we live in time, that wonderful construct made by man, you're never gonna find out. Well, I won't say never. You could find out if you recreate the same scenario and make another choice. Like say you're shopping at the grocery store and you get this guacamole that you've never gotten before because it looks like it has some pico de gallo in it, and it looks chunky and tasty. But it's a dollar more than the guacamole you usually get. So you try it, great!! You open it. You try it. It doesn't taste as good as it looks. So now you're going, "Okay, but what if I would've gotten what I usually get? Well, I wouldn't have wasted my money on this." So the next time you go back shopping and you need to get guac, you're not gonna buy the same thing that you bought before. You answered the ‘but what if’ question in that scenario. What about going out dancing? I'm gonna go out dancing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm gonna wear these cool looking shoes. Even though they're thinner than most of my shoes, I'm still gonna wear them 'cause they look great. Three hours later, your feet are hurting because you've tried to dance and you realize the sides of your feet are getting squished right below your toes. It's like getting squished, and it's uncomfortable. But what if I would have worn these other shoes? But what if can spoil many, many, many a good time, if it hasn't been spoiled already, that is. But what if is a great question that all of us should ask ourselves. Remember, making a decision is your superpower, and it is one of the things that we humans always get to do. It's not that you ‘have’ to, you ‘get’ to. That's where the power is! You take charge of your life and make these decisions for the betterment of your existence at any given moment. Some of them are really small decisions, like I'm not gonna brush my teeth very much longer than X, Y, or Z, and some of them are really, really big decisions,m “Well, I really liked that house even though it's ten thousand dollars more than I can afford.”, or “I really, really like the color of that car even though it doesn't have a sunroof.”, or “I really, really like you even if you snore.” But what if he didn't snore? What if that person didn't snore? Would they be more desirable? Maybe. Can you live without a sunroof in your car? Maybe. You still have the power of choice, and that choice is yours. So have you thought about it? Have you thought about ‘but what if?’ I mean, it's pretty hard to listen to what I'm saying and not consider the possibilities. Many things are possible in this life, and every time we make a choice, we split off on another path which is going to lead to another choice. We make more decisions in a day than we realize. So if you take maybe three minutes out of a day and try to examine every single little tiny decision that you make, it'll blow your mind. It really will!! I always like going back to the whole brushing the teeth scenario because everybody brushes their teeth, and not everybody brushes their teeth exactly the same as somebody else, but they do brush their teeth. I look at that process because it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it's something that a lot of humans are familiar with. I love taking apart that scenario when looking at, ‘but what if’? Okay, in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you started on the upper outside, went around the front doing your up and down strokes till you got to the other side. Then you went down to the bottom teeth doing up and down strokes, going around the front to the other side. Then you did the tops of that bottom row, and then you switched and did the bottoms of the top row, and then you ended up on the inside of that far side, and you did your up and down strokes across the front and the reverse on the bottom. Have you brushed your teeth? Yes. Was it effective? Don't know. Rinse!! Evaluate. You run your tongue across your teeth. Do they feel clean? If not, well, maybe you start on the tops of the bottom row on the right side, and then you go all the way around and then the bottoms of the top all the way around. Put your teeth together and do both upper and lower up and down strokes all the way around. Rinse!! Do your teeth feel cleaner? Do they? But what if you would have used a different toothpaste? That one that they show where the lady brushes her teeth a little bit and spits it out, and it looks like a little blood, and then she stands up, and there's another person looking at her in the mirror. Maybe that's what I need. My question is, have you decided what clean teeth feel like before you start. Because if you have no destination, if you have no goal, you're never gonna know whether you've been successful or not. Some people don't think like that. Some people, they just go and do things, and they don't realize that maybe doing things that they're used to doing another way will end up with a different result. Might be a more positive result, might be a more negative result. Either way, it'll be different, won't it? I said a couple episodes ago, my pops was awesome. He says, "I never get lost, I just find new ways of getting places," which is one way of looking at it. Some people won't go anywhere unless they know where they're going first because they don't wanna get lost. They don't wanna find new ways of getting places. That's why they have that voice telling them, "In 200 yards, turn left." Can't you just see that on the picture? Why do you have to have that voice? Oh, you wanna be ‘told’ what to do. Sorry, I'm a militant. I don't want to be told what to do. Plus, I grew up reading maps, so I kinda understand street names, points of interest like, oh, look, there's a 10-story building right across the street from another 10-story building. One of them is silver and filled with glass, one of them has a lot of brick, and the other one doesn't, and there's a Jack in the Box, or there's a McDonald's, or there's another restaurant right there, and that's where I turn. Everybody does it different. Navigations can be done many ways, right? So you can use the ‘but what if’ scenario here as well. But what if you changed the voice to an Australian accent or a British accent? What if you made it female? What if you made it male? But what if. One of the most dangerous things our minds do is reevaluate what we do. And if we're not careful, if we're not paying attention, it could take us down a blind alley. Mentally, we end up in a space that we didn't wanna end up in, and this is what happens to me. I end up buried in a corner with really no idea how I got there, and then I start feeling some sort of way, and it's like being in a cave. I need light. How did I get here? You may ask yourself, "How did I get here?" Well, you made a bunch of decisions. So you go back over all the decisions trying to figure out which is the one that put you in the place you don't wanna be. Then you have to figure out how far are you gonna go back, or do you just start over? But what if you can't start over? But what if you don't know the way back? These are things that all of us deal with. And I'll leave you with this. We really, really, really have a bad habit of over-evaluating our decisions. When I say that, I mean, number one, I'm guilty as charged. Number two, going over something over and over and over again, since it's already passed, is kind of a waste if you do it for too long. If you keep reliving a bad decision, your chances of making a better decision next time in the same scenario are greatly decreased. Why? Because you're playing, "But what if I would've done this instead of that?" Or, "What if I would've done this other thing?" My suggestion is you keep it very, very simple. We are all human. We are going to make mistakes. Say it with me. I AM HUMAN. I AM GOING TO MAKE MISTAKES!! How do you handle those mistakes? Therein lies the rub. How we handle the mistakes we make, now THERE is something constructive!! And I could also say, but what if instead of thinking that you're going to make a mistake, what if you actually said, "But what if instead of a negative outcome, you foresaw a positive one? What if you're wrong in a right way?” Think about that one. But what if? It's challenging, and if you stay too long at that fair, I guarantee you it's gonna drive you nuts!! Limit the possibilities to one or two different possibilities. Pick the best one, try to remember it, and then when faced with a similar situation, play, "But what if I do this?" Or, "What if I say that?" Or, "What if I go here?" Or, "What if I don't do anything?" It's complicated, I know, but you know what, you made it this far and I like your chances!! So keep on trying. If you don't try, you're never gonna know one way or another. That's all I got for you this week!! Take good care of yourselves, I will check you out on the flip side!! Buh-bye!!!