Transcript

DE-termination · Wanzology

What is going on with you? What is going on? Hey, hey, hey. Welcome back or welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY. I am your host, The Wanz coming to you live and direct from WANZ0MATIC Music Studios. Yep. I'm a little silly today, but I, uh, I'm determined. Are you determined? Are you determined? Do you have the will, the fortitude to engage with whatever it is you are doing and continue until you reach some sort of resolution? I am, I want to look at the word determination. 'cause it's interesting to me that it's un-terminating. D-term as opposed to termin, short for terminate or end, so if we're not ending and we're not beginning, what are we doing continuing? What do you call it? I call it continuing. Every single day that we get up or that I get up, since I'm speaking for myself, every day that I get up, I am determined to accomplish something. Some days, those some things are a long list and some days they're one or two things, but either way, that wonderful mechanism of time has us moving forward all the time. Always. Time, rarely, if ever goes backwards. You can reminisce on it, go back to it, refer for your own, for your own reason, you can go backwards, but the world in and of itself never does, and since you only live in this world, that means neither do you. You can take the time to go back and remember, ‘oh, her kisses was so sweet’, or you can remember, ‘I didn't like that job anyway, and I don't care that they fired me’, or you can remember something in between. That first time that your baby smiled at you that last time, you got to look at that loved one and hold their hand before they transitioned and passed away. Either way, the reminiscing of things is the easy part. The decoupling de-termination, the un-terminating of something is to me very, very interesting. Determination from the Oxford Dictionary, “firmness of purpose, the process of establishing something exactly by calculation or research”, or you could look at it, what's the true meaning of determination? “The unwavering commitment to achieve a goal despite obstacles and setbacks”. Maybe you would prefer a spiritual definition, “that we have yielded our whole self to our will”. Biblical? “Purposing to accomplish God's goals in God's time, regardless of the opposition”. Translation? Basically, determination is the actual propulsion that gets you from here to there, wherever there is. It doesn't seem like it, but if you stop and look through your memory banks. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It took a lot for you to get to where you are. Some days were easy, some days were not, some days were just minutiae in between. Some days you made really, really good choices, some days you didn't, but all of it in its aggregate, got you to where you are. You didn't stop moving forward with time. You may have taken a time-out so you could go reminisce, look back on your past, figure out how you got to where you are. If you're in a bad state, if you're in a bad place, if you're uh, going through a bad patch of quote unquote ‘luck’ right? Now, have you looked over the choices that got you there to figure out which one was the bad choice, nd if you found the bad choice, have you made it before? Now that you're aware of that bad choice, will you make it again? These are the things that can drive you mad, trying to figure too many things out at one time. I wanted to question do you understand determination? Do you recognize and respect that you have it? Because if you're listening to my voice right now, you didn't get this far simply by being lucky you didn't get this far simply because you could. I'm always quick to remind everyone, not everybody makes it this far. Some people didn't wake up today and didn't know yesterday that they wouldn't. Nobody, and I do mean nobody can predict the future. Not even you. “Oh, I know what's gonna happen!”, “I knew they were gonna do that!”, “I knew he would say that!”, “I knew that she would say that, wear that!”, you did not. You thought you did, and maybe it happened to come out that way, but you didn't know it was going to happen. None of us knows what's going to happen. We try to anticipate, as best we can, based on our experience, because most of life is very cyclical, meaning it goes around in circles. That phrase, “What goes around, comes around”, is insanely accurate. You may not think about it, but when you do think about it from a high enough level, yeah, it's correct. What goes around comes around. So that means a choice that you make today, even in the same situation as a week ago, might have a different outcome. Don't think so. How many times a month do you have the same thing for dinner? Your favorite meal, spaghetti, pizza, chicken, wings, salad, how many times a month do you have the same meal or variations of a meal? Why? Well, you've determined that you really like this certain thing. For me, once I learned how to air fry chicken, I don't use my air fryer for anything else. I've had it for three years. The only thing I make in it is fried chicken because I love the way it turns out I have a nice little process, 20 minutes, 10 minutes to cool, sometimes 15 'cause that stuff is hot. But I always know what it's gonna taste like. It's my favorite go-to thing to do, but it takes preparation. I have to remember to take chicken out of the freezer. Then I have to remember not to let it thaw too long. Then I have to remember, preheat, yes, we must preheat. And then season the chicken wallet's preheating and then when the preheating section is done, open it up, putting it in the basket without touching anything because everything in there is hot. Set the timer, start the process of cooking. 20 minutes later, the cooking part ends and let it sit in there for about five minutes so it can ‘rest’, and I open it up and it'll still take me another five, ten minutes before I'll even take it out 'cause usually I use my hands and it's really, really hot and by the time it cools down, I am ready for it. Salivation levels rise and I'm just like moving my head back and forth going, “Oh boy, here we go! Here we go!” Stone cold, munchin’!! How about you? How do you determine things come to the conclusion of things? How do you anticipate and why? When you turn around and look back at parts of your life, how did you get from one place, one week, one year to another? Were there times that you felt you just wanted to stop? You just wanted to give up, not do it anymore? You did anyway, even if you felt like that, right? Such is the nature of determination. You're not terminating, you're not ending, you're carrying on, you're figuring out a way. Some of you are even being ‘like water’, because water always finds a way no matter what the opposition, no matter what the hardship, no matter what, who, when, you still figured out a way to move from there to here. From then to now, and I want you to question the motivation that did those things. If you do that, you'll find deep down, disguised by all sorts of things is determination. You want to succeed, you want…fill in the blank, and if you want something. Well, well, well, you're going to have to do something. Is it something you've done before? Is it something you're sure you don't want to do again, either way, the evaluative process before making a choice is driven at the root by determination. Don't think so. Try not eating for a day. How far do you get? 'Cause your body wants to be fed, and in some cases, most cases it needs to be fed, and so you feed it. Sometimes you have to wait a while before you finish doing whatever it is you're doing. You have to finish doing that before you can go on to eating, or you can put it off until some other time, but sooner or later, sooner or later, you're gonna eat. That's another example of determination. Your body is naturally determined to feed, and the longer that you postpone that feeding, some people go through weird changes. Some people get what they call ‘hangry’. Some people just start to run down. You don't feed yourself long enough and your body will start to slow down, because it's run out of energy. No fuel in the tank. How do you get from here to wherever there is? Even though there's all this adversity, complications, problems, people, places, things, situations that seem to get in your way, yet you keep striving to reach THERE, wherever ‘there’ is for whatever's ‘there’, that is your determination. You didn't get where you are simply by being lucky. I want and hope that you will learn how to compliment yourself for getting through the simplest of things. ‘Cause you got through a lot of good times and you've gotten through a lot of bad times. The aggregate of it all has made up what you have as a life. I don't care if you're 12, 22, 50, 70, you didn't get where you are simply by luck, you have learned and will learn some ‘thangs’, and those, some ‘thangs’ tend to come in handy when, ”Oh wow, look at that! I've done that before!”. When something familiar comes up, life is sort of cyclical. From a general standpoint. What goes around comes around. So if you did it one way before, are you gonna do it again the same way? Probably not, because the circumstances of where you are now are different from where you were then. None of us are the same as we used to be. All of us have the potential to be something else tomorrow, but it will take determination to get there. D-termination. Not ending. As long as you are breathing, I encourage you no matter what, keep trying. The theme song for my podcast is called “You Just Get Lucky”, and what it starts with is: 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. That's just been my experience: Lucky to see. Lucky to hear, to smell, touch, and taste this life. Lucky to be, to have my shot and what I got is life. That's you. That's us. Determination is built into us to help us get from then to now and from now to whatever's next. Pat yourself on the back for the little things. Some people don't get the opportunity to do the little things that you do, and when they try, they fail or when they try, they fail. So give yourself a little credit. It may seem like life is suckin’ real bad right now, but it didn't always used to and it may seem like life is really good right now, but it didn't always used to be. There are pockets, there are moments in time that just don't work, and that's fine, as long as you remember how you got there. When you can remember how you got to where you are, that's where the lesson is to get to where you want to be. The lesson is to get you where you want to be. Your determination will take you there. Thank you very much for hangin with me. I am The Wanz, your host of WANZOLOGY, telling you to keep breathing. If you think you have a problem, just try not breathing. because when you don't breathe, then you really have a problem. Trust me! Be good and then, uh, like be good to somebody else. Okay? That'd be great!! See ya, Bye.