Transcript

This Is 65!! · Wanzology

This is 65!! This Is 65 Ba da da da, ba da da, ba da da dum bing. Yo, peoples, how you doing? I'm doing okay. Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY. I am your host, The Wanz, coming at you live from the upper left-hand corner of the United States of America. This week... First, how are you? You good? Are you, are you still breathing? If you're still breathing, the hard part really is over. Because if you're not breathing, then you're probably not listening to me, and none of this, none of this matters, so as long as you're breathing, you got a shot. You have an opportunity to overcome everything. Okay, you'll have to forgive me. Usually, I record these episodes in the afternoon or evening, but I'm doing this one in the wee small hours of the morning, and the coffee has not taken effect yet. So you're gonna get what you're gonna get. This has been bugging me for a couple of days, and I'm gonna put it to you so that you can think about it as well. I have just turned 65 years old. I don't care what age you are now, you know 65 years old is a milestone! It is a level that a lot of people just don't reach, right? I mean, the fact that you're listening to this right now tells me that you've made it a certain distance in your life, a level, as it were. There is a certain level that all of us get to reach, but none of us, and I do mean none of us, knows what that level is until after we've reached it. That's the amazing part of being human. Time. I'm not sure whether it's a good thing or it's a bad thing, but this gets into the individual's perspective, so to speak. How you look at your time, the time you spend, the time you save, the time you waste, is up to you. It's all up to you. But every year, we humans celebrate the fact that we have gone around the sun again. That's how we keep track of our milestones, right? One year, one complete circle around the sun. We judge ourselves by the year of our birth and what we've done since we can remember. Now, for some, the memory starts early. For others, it starts late. Mine starts at six years old On a playground in Anchorage, Alaska, Fort Richardson Army Base. I was coming home from school. We lived across the street, and I was confronted by a couple of kids, one of which said, "Yeah, listen, he can sing." And the other one said, "I don't believe you." And then asked, "Do you know such and such a song?" And I sang a little bit of it. As I was putting on my genuine imitation bear skin jacket, complete with hood and gloves. It was October and the first real snow of the year. So we start walking down the hall, and another kid comes up and figures out what's going on, asks, "Do you know this song?" And I sang another song, and another one, and another one. Anytime they asked, I just kinda sang a little bit of it. Got outside, and now we're on the schoolyard. Look across the street, because I lived across the street from the school. And like I said, it was October, the first real snow of the year. Big fluffy flakes falling from the sky. The kind that if you stick your tongue out, you can catch them on your tongue, and if you're not paying attention, your eyes will be open, and another one, as soon as you... As soon as one hits your tongue, another one just plasters your eyeball! But all of a sudden, there's like six or seven, eight kids, and they're all putting out song titles. I hear one, I start to sing it a little bit, and another one, start to sing it a little bit. And this kinda went on for what to me seemed like a long time, but it probably wasn't very long. And from behind me, I heard a woman calling my name. Faint, but it was getting louder. I turn around, and it's my mom. My mom has left the house 'cause I guess she looked out the window and saw me on the schoolyard with all these kids around me. I think she thought I was in a fight. So here she comes, running across the street, running across the schoolyard with these fuzzy pink slippers and a ‘June Cleaver’-style dress. If you don't know what that is, Google it. But she had on an apron that was red and white checkerboard. She comes running up, and I stopped singing. I look up, and I see her, and she says, "Michael! Michael, are you all right?" And I just looked at her, and I said, "Yeah, Mom, I'm just singing." So that's my very first memory. It wasn't very long after my sixth birthday. Now every October, no matter where I am, no matter what I'm doing, I go back and think about that memory. Now, that's fine when you're in single digits and in the early double digits, then the twenties, the thirties, the forties. But in the fifties, you start turning around and looking back at all those other decades and start going, "Ah. Uh-oh." Then when you hit the sixties, everything kind of stops. Everything becomes slow or really, really, really fast. There's not really an in-between. You look at that number, sixty-five, the milestone. In the United States, they call that the retirement age, when you're supposed to leave the workforce and live out the rest of your days in relative ease and comfort. Now, if you've done your due diligence, if you've saved your money, invested well, and you haven't had too many financially challenging incidents in your life, you'll do pretty well, given that you don't know how long you've got. That's the thing about time. I've always said it's the most valuable thing that any of us have. One, because you can't replace it. You can't go back and redo what happened yesterday or even ten minutes ago And the second reason it's the most valuable thing we have is nobody knows how much they have. I don't. I don't pretend I know. I don't really guard against having very little or having a lot. I try to stay exactly where I am. I'm very bad at planning. Ask anybody. I've had so many plans go awry that I tried for a portion of my life not to plan anything for fear of the plans going awry, and it created what I call an expectation. My brain making up an environment that I imagined, a fantasy, and then when actual real life didn't exactly follow what I had imagined, well I was angry. I was angry as well as disappointed, and that disappointment kept coming over and over and over again to the point where I'd say, "Why am I even bothering? I'll be wrong." Say you're waiting for a certain event, like your birthday. Well, what happens if right before your birthday you stumble on a crack in the sidewalk and fall down, breaking your knee? What if that event isn't so serious and you're just really kind of expecting to get a large chunk of money in the form of a check in the mail, like a tax return or something? It's supposed to be here yesterday or the day before or the day before that, and you're starting to go, "Hey, where is it?" Well, that's an unmet expectation. You expect that you're going to either do or receive something and it doesn't happen. Now, some people don't mind that at all. On the other side of that coin, there are those who ‘feel’, they just ‘feel’ a certain way about things not happening the way that they imagined, and I'm one of those. If I expect to wake up at a certain time of day and I'm gonna have a cup of coffee and maybe some breakfast, and then I'm gonna take the dishes from breakfast and put them in the sink, and then I'm gonna go for a walk for about a mile, mile and a half or so, come back and pick up a guitar and start going through some finger exercises, well, I'm disappointed because I finish eating and then I lay back to let the food settle, and the next thing I know, I've fallen asleep. And now it's an hour and a half, two hours later than before. So now I have less time in the day. I have less time. The objective is to make the most out of every day. And when you get to be sixty-five, every moment of every day becomes more important. I'm not sure how many of you listening are sixty-five, are about to be sixty-five, are nowhere close to being sixty-five, or have already been sixty-five. All I can tell you is from my experience, it's a very interesting feeling how one perceives every moment they're alive. It's different. Sometimes it's desperate. Sometimes, well, you just throw up your hands and go, "I don't know. I did the best that I could and still nothing seems right," or, "Damn, I've got it good," or, "I got a birthday card from a family member I didn't expect," or, "I got a bill that I didn't expect," or, "Damn, when will these insurance companies stop sending me advertisements?" Either way, the day will come where your expectations are unmet, and hopefully you won't look back on yesterday or the week before or the month before that or the year before that as a disappointment, because that's not the point. What I'm so far learning about sixty-five at the time of this recording, four days into it, sixty-five is another milestone. There's significance around this milestone because of all the things that came before it. All these expectations, all these examples of other people and what they did when they got to be that age or didn't reach that age It means something when someone says, "Yep, I'm sixty-five," because it's the designated retirement age. Now, as a retired person, there are certain expectations, but if you didn't do the things that you were supposed to do or the things that you were supposed to do, you didn't do them very well, sixty-five becomes a disappointment. Either way, what I want you to focus on isn't so much whether you have reached, are going to reach, or will not reach sixty-five. What I want you to try and do is look at where you are right now. At the time of this listening, where are you in your life? What are you doing with your life? Are you making the most of it, or are you just kinda letting things slip away and not really trying to do this, that, or the other? Or do you have so many things that you wanna do, you just don't have enough time to do 'em? The choice is always yours. That's your superpower!! Choice!! But when you look at what you have done, what you didn't do, what you wanna do, and you evaluate all the things, remember, your best thinking got you exactly where you are. How you deal with where you are will help you deal with whatever's coming, even if there's nothing there. I turned sixty-five, and I look at my life differently than when I turned sixty-four, sixty, fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, or ten. We all evolve as we get older, and time becomes something different. Evaluate where you are, use everything that you have around you at that time, and then go do the best that you can at anything, even if that's nothing. What you do with your life is your choice. Now, here's the rub, everybody has that choice and is doing exactly the same thing you are. If you feel disappointed because you're thirty-eight and you're stressed out, you don't have a house and you do have kids, but your marriage or relationship with the mother of your kid is not going very well, fix it while you have the time. Then again, if you're sixty-eight, seventy, seventy-five, kids, grandkids grown up, you're on a cruise somewhere in the Mediterranean, the sun is shining, and you're sipping a cool drink, not worrying about a thing, congratulations!! I will leave you with this. One must remember, everything is temporary. Everything. Everything!! What happened has happened. How you felt a year ago may or may not be how you feel now. How you feel now may or may not be how you feel in two or three hours, two or three minutes. You just don't know. But you gotta pay attention. If you don't pay attention, you run the risk of missing whatever opportunity you wanted to have. Sixty-five, it's waiting for all of us. Whether we make it or not is not up to us. Life is gonna be circumstantial, and you may or may not get there. You may have already left it. You may or may not want to get to sixty-five. It's still gonna be your choice, really. How you live your life is up to you. If you're not living it the way you'd like, then you can take steps to change it if you know what you'd like. There are those of us who have absolutely, positively no idea. So don't base what you like, dislike, want, or don't want on others. Search within yourself, gather all the information that you can, make the best decision you can, and live with the consequences, be they bad or not. That is how life actually works. Doesn't matter whose life it is. That's how it works. Start from wherever you are, use whatever you've got, and do the best that you can. As the saying goes, do your best, leave the rest. I've done my best this episode, and I'm gonna leave because I'm on to the next thing. As I told my kids, “Whatever you're gonna do, do it now because later, you wanna be doing something else”, and nobody knows how many laters they have. Take good care of yourself, maybe even go and do that for somebody else, and I'll talk to you next week. Peace!!