Transcript

Uncertainty · Wanzology

Uncertainty Happy Wednesday, happy Wednesday! What's going on? How ya doing? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY, and I am your host, The Wanz, and I'm wishing you a happy Wednesday, hump day, middle of the week, whatever it is for you!! Right off top, there have been some very interesting things happening on the interwebs when it comes to all things WANZOLOGY. If you've been looking for WANZOLOGY on Instagram or Facebook, you'll notice it's not there. When you are suspended for violating community guidelines on Facebook, every page that you have is disabled. Not the one that they find fault with, but all of them. It's been going on for a little while. I have been in Facebook jail now for pretty much three weeks, with no explanation of what I did wrong, just that I violated, and of all things the WANZOLOGY page, violated their community guidelines. So, uh, I'm kind of stuck where I'm stuck, I am where I am. I have to apologize. I don't mean for it to, uh, cramp your style, cause God knows it cramps mine, but I am very close to actually finishing a WANZOLOGY webpage. That will become another mechanism by which we can connect. Because I would love to know who you are. since you spent all this time finding out who I am, so to speak. Moving on. Today, I am uncertain. I woke up uncertain at about 5:10 a.m. for no ungodly reason and as I laid in bed and thought about what I was uncertain about, I became less certain about a lot of things. I was confused by the fact that I was uncertain. So I looked it up. I looked up the word “uncertain”. It's an adjective, meaning: not known beyond doubt, not having certain knowledge, not clearly identified or defined. And those three things completely describe my state of mind today. So as I was fixing some food and getting about my day, I was thinking, “Well, what am I going to do about it?”, “How do I combat this uncertainty, and what exactly am I uncertain about?”? Well, the answer to the second question is almost everything. I'm uncertain about so many things. Even making breakfast, it's like, okay, I have fruit, I have yogurt, and I have a cheddar cheese bagel, and a cup of coffee. That's usually what I have for breakfast every day, but I wasn't sure if that's what I wanted. Because God knows, I don't make enough money to be able to afford eggs. I have some bacon, but I don't have no eggs and I don't have my usual pancake mix. I need to order some more. And so I'm thinking about what I'm going to have for breakfast and I'm uncertain with what I want, but I decide on the cheddar cheese bagel bowl of fruit covered in yogurt and a cup of coffee. And as I'm eating, consuming, and it's very good, by the way, me and Yoplait, we go miles, miles, miles back! But I found that, uh, one of my grocery stores, they sell a tray of fruit for about 19 bucks and it's big. It fills a two-quart Tupperware container. That's breakfast for me for about a week. So, as I'm consuming, it's like, what am I gonna do with my day? I'm looking at how do I feel right now? What am I feelings feeling like right now? I'm uncertain about what those feelings are, I'm very in between. I don't feel bad, and I don't feel good, and I don't feel sad, and I don't feel happy. Yesterday was a really good day for me because I got to perform with, with an old friend of mine and ran into more old friends and met some new ones! And man, if I can perform anytime, I'm, I'm always happy. So that was good, but this was a new day. Now what? Now what? I can't just sit and revel in yesterday's glory, I have to figure out what I'm going to do today, and that's what I'm uncertain about. What do you do when you're uncertain about things? When you're uncertain whether you should ask your significant other a very pointed question like, “What’s wrong?”, or, “Is something bothering you?”, or maybe it's your boss, “Hey, have you thought about maybe, uh, granting me a raise? I haven't had one in a while.”, or, “Do you mind if I take this coming Friday off? I need to travel because a family member is not expected to make it.”, or, “I'm not feeling very well. Have you been sick? Have you had your shots?” Are you uncertain about things and if you are, how do you handle them? How do you get past the uncertainty? How do you quench the thirst for knowing that which you currently doubt? How do you define what is currently unidentified? I understand that for everyone, it would be different. For me, there are only two tracks, I f it's something that I can find out, I try to find out. Like before I started this recording, you know, I went to the interwebs, found a dictionary. What does uncertainty really mean? It's “a state of being uncertain.”, so I had to look at “uncertain”, an adjective and I just read you what it was. But when it comes to, “Great, what am I going to have for lunch? When am I going to take out the garbage? Do I want to go for a walk today, even though it's going to rain? Who is it that I haven't called in a while that I would really like to talk to? Play guitar maybe? How about I take a nap?” All these wonderful little activities that I could involve myself in, but I'm uncertain as to which one to choose. What I do is I let things sit for a while. As I was eating my breakfast, I was debating whether I wanted to record this episode or leave it off for another time. And as I sat and was chewing on the last of my bagel and drinking the rest of my coffee, the fruit bowl was looking really good and I had to get to it. I started thinking, well, what do I tell other people? I tell people all the time, “Do it now. Because later, you want to be doing something else.”, yeah, the day is young, so later what do I want to be doing? Well, I want to do something else. I know later this evening there's a drop in jazz jam that I'm probably going to try to hit, but what happens between now and then? I don't know, I could do this, I could do that, I could do this other thing, and I haven't chosen yet because I chose to do what I'm doing right now. But ‘now’ doesn't last very long, does it? How do you get past your uncertainties around how you feel inside or with what's going on outside of you? Inside of you or outside of you? If you're uncertain as to your partner's strange behavior lately or really nice behavior lately or how are they feeling and why do you want to find out or are you just going to sit there and be uncertain about it? My pops would always tell me, “A question never killed anybody!”, but damn, gotta admit, it is sometimes extremely difficult to ask a question because you don't know what the answer is going to be. Granted, that's what uncertainty is, not knowing, right? But in order to get the answer, one must ask a question. If you're not sure about something, I can guarantee you at some point in the process, you ask the inside of you, part of your brain, one of those voices that's talking all the time. You're asking, “Well, what do I want to do? What could I do? What should I do? What shouldn't I do?”, but you get there, you get past it, right? And you make a decision, you move on. You make a decision, there are consequences, good or bad, and then you move on, right? That's the way it works. In earlier episodes, I've called this a human's ‘superpower’. Most teenagers don't realize that they have this power, they’re just barely discovering it. Kind of like in that “Man of Steel” movie. Superman is learning he can fly, but he's not good at it. So, he keeps trying and trying and, of course, within three minutes he's mastered it. Boy, wish we could be that good. I know I do. I wish I could master something in two or three minutes. That'd be great. Probably wouldn't have gotten laid off from my job two years ago. Ah yes, but reality is what it is. So, what are you going to do? What question are you going to ask? And more importantly, what question are you going to answer? If you don't know, let me ask you this, have you thought about whether how you feel right now is familiar or not? Have you been where you're at trying to decide what you're uncertain about and what to do next? Have you been here before? I mean like, when I was saying earlier, I was going to have breakfast. Well, I was uncertain with what I was going to have, but then again, I have breakfast pretty much every day. So it was pretty easy to go back. Well, what did I have yesterday or the day before that, or the week before that, or the month before that? Well, you can do the same thing. You didn't get where you are right now by accident. Did you? I highly doubt it. So, if you've been where you are before, what did you do the last time? Do you want to do the same thing again? Maybe try something different. I had a friend tell me once, “You know, if something feels familiar, do something you've never done before so that you can have a different experience with a familiar situation.” And the times that I've tried it, you know, it's pretty split 50/50. Sometimes it's been really good, sometimes it's been really bad. For instance, yesterday, during this whole performance thing, I was done I thought I had done all the songs that I was gonna do. I sung all the things I was gonna sing. There was another singer on stage, and she's doing a song, and I'm singing a backup part, and she sees that I know the backup part and she's waving me on stage. Next thing you know, I'm on-stage singing backups for her. I was uncertain as I was standing in the audience, I was uncertain as I tried to scale the two and a half foot stage with no railing, my old ass-knees, but I got there and it was hella fun. HELLA FUN!!! Uncertainty can lead to great payoffs, especially if you're in a familiar situation, one where you have experience, one where you have, how they say, ‘evidence’ of either succeeding or failing in. So, uncertainty really is nothing more than a momentary thing, unless you extend it, like I did this morning. Sometimes things are really easy and sometimes you decide and your uncertainty multiplies because you're not sure whether you made the right move after making that last move. It doesn't seem like it's getting closer to a good consequence, how does it? But I want to leave you with two very important points. The first one I alluded to earlier, you did not get where you are by accident. Most of how you got to where you are right now is based upon past experience, past uncertainties that you got past. You got through them. Try and recall them. I mean, how did you get from yesterday to today? How did you get from earlier to right now? And I mean, really think about these things in a granular way, not, “I just put one foot in front of the other.”, that's not helpful. Go back and see if something feels familiar. The second thing to do is do you feel brave enough to accept the consequences of whatever decision you make, which sounds really daunting, sounds really serious, and God knows in certain situations it could be, but this may or may not be one of them and the only way you're going to find out is making a decision and acting on that decision. There's a part of, I believe it's the second matrix where the Oracle is telling Neo, “We can't understand the answer to a question we haven't asked.”, o if you're uncertain, that's a good thing. Look at it as an opportunity to learn. Learn about you, how you behave, how you feel, how your feelings and actions affect others. There's so much to learn from uncertainty, so it's not all bad, don't panic. Like I said, if you think about it, you've probably been here before, and you already know what you've done. And if what you have done wasn't good, that means you do something else, or else, you will become the definition of insanity, which is, what? “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” I beg of you, please, don't do that. That's just deflecting uncertainty, “Oh, I'll just do this because I did it the last time.”, well were you happy with the outcome? “Uh, I don't know.”, figure it out. Nobody knows you like you do. You can ask for opinions on the outside, but all the good stuff happens on the inside and like I began with, you didn't get here, you didn't get this far without bravery, power, courage, determination, knowledge. And those things anyone can use more of, so go get you some. I am The Wanz, and this has been an episode of WANZOLOGY!! Remember y'all, “Keep putting faith in front and believe, The best is yet to come, you'll see! Nothing in this life comes completely free, But every once in a while, you just get lucky.” I'm out. Ciao for now.