Hey! Good evening, good morning, how ya doing? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!!! I hope that life is treating you well. I am hanging in there. The new year hasn't quite figured out how to screw me over yet, but I anticipate that it will be a fast learner.
Lord, help us. It is the last what I will call free week for democracy, but that's a whole ‘nother topic that I don't want to get into. What I really want to get into is a question that I asked myself What if? What if? I consider what if to be the doorway to possibility? Inspiring, fearful, sometimes impossible possibility.
What is it with what if? All that does is like, turn the cogs inside your head and get your imagination rolling towards whatever, doesn't it? What if you had won the lotto? What if you got a ten room, eight-bathroom house on a lake…tax free? What if one of your kids invented the cure for cancer? What if you decided that you weren't going to work anymore and that little goofy project that you were working on in your den or your garage gets a patent and you become a millionaire? What if the best idea you ever had gets you in the most trouble you've ever been in? What if, it's the gateway to possibility, but you have to be careful when you say what if cause without careful consideration, without challenging your imagination to figure out both sides of the line, the good And the bad, you could be setting yourself up for something horrible. H O R R I B L E. HORR-I-BLE! Kind of like that old saying, nothing grows out slower than a bad haircut. I say nothing passes slower than the time between your last horrible idea and your next possibly horrible idea. What if? If you could be anything, do anything, go anywhere, what would you do? Would you go someplace for pleasure, business, for kicks? What if?
Now the reason that I got hung up on this is because it used to be the most challenging thing in a person's life is when they came to a fork in the road. Either you're gonna go left or you're gonna go right and you can't see where the destination is and there's no signs, they look like the exact same path, how do you choose? Are you right-handed so you'll take the right path? Or, are you left handed and still take the right path or vice versa? Either way, something's gonna happen because you've never been down either road before. How do you choose? How do you make up your mind? Well, most people use what if. What if you take the left fork and it turns out to be ten miles longer than the right fork, but it goes through one or two more towns and in one of those towns, you stop to go to the bathroom and when you come out, you start talking to this young lady who's dropped her books on the ground and you pick up the books and you put them back in her arms. And she looks at you and you look at her and it's love at first sight. And you never leave that town ever again. Or what if you take the right fork, and it turns out to be 50 miles longer than the other, and you end up going through some of the worst swamps, thickets, berry bushes with thorns, and there's no path. The road was run out long ago, you have to go forward. You can't go back. What if?
Do you realize that every decision that you make in the course of a day is a what if decision? You wake up, turn off the alarm clock, maybe, rub your eyes, throw the covers off, yawn, sit up straight, put your feet on the floor, what's next? I don't know. Well, what if I got up to go to the bathroom? What if I picked out my clothes? What if I got back into bed? Choice, choice, choice and I've said it a million times, the solution and the problem is choice. When you were a kid, wasn't it easy to play What If? What if you were a cowboy or an Indian? What if you were a fireman? What if you were a doctor? What if you were, I don't know, a tree surgeon? What if you were a mechanic? What if you were a stylist, and your imagination runs wild, right? You can actually see the pictures in your mind about what it would feel like, almost, you can almost feel it and what it would look like to be whatever it is you're imagining. So what happened? You grew up and that ability went away? Nope. All that happened is you grew up and discovered what failure feels like and some of us, some of us have held on to that failure for so long. We don't even remember what success looks like anymore.
Hopefully, you're not one of those. I've been one of those, it's not fun. No matter what happens, no matter what choice you make, you know, it's gonna be the wrong one? You're quite positive, you're quite assured if there's a right decision, you are probably not going to make it. It's a horrible existence, but you still have this power to turn everything around life is about how you see things, not exactly about what you see.
How you see things. Do you see a choice as an opportunity? Or do you see a choice as a burden? Possible punishment? The world is full of opportunities. None of which you'll be able to take advantage of if you miss them. You're gonna miss 100 percent of all the opportunities you don't see. Right? What about the ones you do see? What if you see two opportunities at the same time? You gotta choose. Maybe you can figure out a way to do both. And this is, once again, What If? What if you woke up tomorrow and decided, I'm never going back to that job ever again? What if you went to bed last night convinced that whoever it is sleeping in the bed with you is doing it for the last time? What if? What if you could put the bottle down and never pick it up again. What if you didn't have to live in survival mode every hour of every day?
Can you imagine? I think you can. How do you think you got this far? At some point, you imagined what you needed to do, and you took the steps towards it, and then you did it, and then you're on to the next. Can you go back over, I don't know, go back over your last meal, whatever it was? What if you ate something different than what you already ate, and you didn't eat it all you say? What if you actually had a full-fledged four course dinner, for free? What if you didn't have a place to sleep tonight, and you had to be outside? Up here in Seattle, it's very chilly. It's not cold, I mean, there's no snow on the ground, and for now it's not raining but it is definitely not comfortable. It's damp, and cold, and dark. And I've often wondered, would I be able to hack it? Would I be able to survive if I didn't have a residence? I don't know. It's been a long time since I've lived in survival mode like that. But what if, what if everything that has gone your way reverses itself one thing at a time?
Kind of like the movie trading places. Winthorpe had the best of everything until his bosses decided to play a little trick on him. And then all of a sudden, none of the amenities of being a rich white guy were available. One by one, they took them all away. And near the middle of the movie, actually, Winthorpe has turned into an animal, living in survival mode. What would happen to you? What if you started losing everything a little bit at a time? Nibble here, flat tire there, insufficient funds here, bad credit report over there, repo car, landlord raises the rent, you can't pay. What are you gonna do? I'll tell you what you're gonna do. You're gonna figure it out. And why do I say that? Why do I say you're gonna figure it out?
The reason that I say that is because I don't even know you and I know for a fact you didn't get to where you are just by luck, just by chance. You've made some pretty critical decisions in your life. If you're listening to this podcast, you had to decide to listen to this podcast. And if you weren't listening to it, what if you were doing something else and you totally missed this episode of this podcast? What if, when you were done listening to this episode of this podcast, you thought about how you can do this thing that you've been putting off for a long, long time. What if you finally got up the courage to say what was on your mind to that person you really care about or that you really hate? How did you get this far again? Oh yeah, that's right, lots of little, teeny weenie choices. Lots of teeny-weenie-weenie-weenie choices that were made with your brain going, what if? I mean you've been doing it so long, the what if part doesn't even really count, you don't even see it, let alone think about it. Usually in your head, don't the sentences start, well, I could dot-dot-dot. Or maybe I could, dot-dot-dot-dot. Sometimes after all the dots you go, well, what if I and boom? Nope, didn't work. What's next? Try something else?
Do you really think that your existence is controlled by outside forces? Do you believe fate is against you? Do you believe in luck or the lack thereof?
Doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. You can believe anything you want to believe, but life is built on two things, decision and action. Everything that comes before a decision, all this configuring and thinking, and maybe it's this, maybe it's that, maybe it's the other thing, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 1 and 1 equals 15. Maybe it's hexadecimal, I don't know. But then comes the action, where you actually do something, go somewhere and do something, and then you look at the result and you go, no, that's not it, or yay!!! Or somewhere in between. What do you do? How do you do it? You ever think about these things? I challenge you, this is going to be awesome, I challenge you to take a deep dive into one of the simplest things we humans do, brushing our teeth.
When I say get into it, take it apart, I mean you're standing where you're standing, there's a toothbrush, there's the toothpaste, and then slowly go through the process of brushing your teeth. From the beginning of reaching for the toothbrush and the toothpaste. Brushing your teeth, and then putting the toothbrush and the toothpaste back, back where it started. I challenge you, I challenge you to do that simple thing, but pay attention to every single action you do. It's not as easy as you think it is. There's more to it than I think you can imagine, but I want you to try it. I want you to take apart the process of brushing your teeth and be mindful of every single action it takes for you to brush your teeth, from beginning to end. I want you to do that, and then I want you to go to Instagram, and go to WANZOLOGY, and I want you to post on WANZOLOGY!! Just search for it, you'll find it, put a post up there, maybe even a picture of the toothbrush, I don't know, let yourself go!! But yeah, this is the mind experiment for the week.
I dare you, I dare you, I dare you to do something like that. I mean, you don't have to brush your…you can pick something else, as long as it's a process. As long as it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Brushing your teeth is probably one of the simplest things we do and that's why I picked it. Lots of places to go sideways. Lots of thoughts to get hung up on. “Oh, I didn't know I did that.” But make sure to post your result on Instagram. WANZOLOGY. Alright?
Next week, the whole United States is going to change because a certain person is going to take over as president. I can guarantee you next week's episode is probably going to be political. Why? Because every single person, and this is hypothetical, I don't know for sure, but I suspect that every single person who voted for that person doesn't have a person they call a friend who behaves like that person, and that might be the topic of next week's podcast. But you better buckle up, buttercup, because the United States of America is about to go through a change, and unless you actually lived through 1968, you have no idea what's about to happen. It's not gonna be as serious as 9/11, but it is gonna be very interesting, like 1968. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, just Google “1968” and look over what happened in 1968. Mark them down, pay attention, and see how many of those things happen again. Similarities, not the differences. That's what we're looking at. Okay?
Till then be cool, and, uh, I will see you next week. Yay!!
Take care now! Bye-Bye!!!