Transcript

Surrender · Wanzology

Surrender Yum da-da da-da dah yah da- da- da-dah yah-yah… How you doing? What's going on? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY, I am your host, The Wanz, and yes, life is life’n at the moment. I don't know whether it's good or bad or ah, what the hell? Like everyone else, I have those times when it just feels like nothing wants to work. Nothing wants to go positively, nothing but a cascade of failure after failure, dead end, after dead end. Confusion, frustration, you name it. And the bad thing for me is that when that happens, I have a tendency to turn it inside on myself, which only magnifies my inadequacies. Yes. When I thought I was capable, I now find I am not capable. I thought I was intelligent, but I'm finding I am, not intelligent. It can be extremely frustrating, frustrating, frustrating , frustrating!! So I ask you my wonderful people, how you determine when the right time is to give up? How do you know when to stop? When to say, when. How do you know you've had enough? Or do you know? Are you just masochistic and just want to keep peddling and pushing, or are you, “Well, that wasn't gonna work anyway, so who cares?” Yeah, surrender is a very interesting thing. When I got sober, they kept telling me surrender was the only way that I would figure out my alcoholism. They told me you had to lose to win, which is counterintuitive at best, yes? Yes! At best, it's counterintuitive. I'm going to lose to win. I didn't quite understand that. The longer I worked at trying to understand the things I didn't understand and the more that I watched other people, I started figuring out like anyone else, I have limits. You gotta know when and where you can push those limits to see if you can go farther, but you must also stay aware, being that you're human, there are certain limitations. Why am I choosing this to speak on? Well, I am learning how to play guitar, again. I don't think I'm very good. I'm certainly not good enough to regularly play in front of people. But I keep having these delusions of grandeur that I could sound better in my simplicity if I had the right equipment. That being said, after watching sort of a guitar hero of mine and checking out his gear, I went looking to see how much one of his little emulators would cost, and I found what I thought was the same thing that he got. Only to find, I had gotten a different model than he had. Now, I could have done the simple and sensible thing and just returned it and said, “You know what? I got the wrong one. I was actually looking for this instead of what I got.”, but no. The ego took over and it was like, “Well, I can make this work. I just need to get a supplemental piece of equipment to help me change the sounds that would come out of this emulator!”, and that can be done with a little thing they call midi. I've known about MIDI for decades, and I understand how many works, and so I started looking for what they call a controller. And I looked and I read, and I looked and I read and finally decided on a controller, and I got it and connected it to the emulator. I could not make the emulator change channels with this midi foot controller to save my life. Maybe it was a hardware incompatibility, I wasn't sure. So what did I do? I did some research and more research. Yeah, what I was trying to do is definitely possible. Brought it up with one of my guitar player friends and he says, “Oh yeah, I have a piece of equipment that you're probably looking for!”, so I borrowed it, brought it home, spent four hours trying to make it work, I couldn't make it work. Hmm. Did some more research. Found out that maybe my friend's piece of hardware was incompatible as well, because there wasn't very much of a footprint on the innerwebs, meaning that not a lot of people have tried what I was trying with the equipment that I had. Alright, so I took the piece of equipment that emulator and I looked to see what was the best mid-foot controller to match with that particular piece of equipment. And I found one, and I read, and the reviews were positive. The testimonials were, “Oh, it's easy, this makes my life so easy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” That was three weeks ago. Every once in a while, I think I'm not very good at reading 'cause I go back and read the manual and it tells me all the things that I need to know about assigning presets and editing the switches and whatnot with the midi that I, I somehow feel I'm capable of, well, I used to be capable of knowing, but somehow this is a conundrum that I couldn't solve. And I waited till the end of this day when I had nothing else going on, and I started from scratch reading the manual of this controller and understanding how it needs to talk to the emulator and made sure all those settings were right, but then I needed to edit the switches on the controller and every time I tried to edit a switch, it kept putting me back at the beginning, not doing what I knew it was capable of doing!! I had the connection correct, if I push buttons on the foot controller, things changed on the emulator. So it seems to me I could set a channel on the emulator and assign that to a foot switch on the controller. No, sounds simple. No, Two and a half hours I tried to get that done and I had to come to the realization that there are just some things I can't do. I tell people all the time, the last line from the movie Magnum Force! Dirty Harry! Clint Eastwood, standing up there looking at this car that has just exploded with a guy who thought he'd get the best of Dirty Harry inside. Harry looks right in the camera and says, “A man's got to know his limitations.” Now, as I said, I have to be careful with failure, and when I say failure, I mean not accomplishing what I set out to do. It's not like, it's not like breakfast this morning, you crack two eggs, you put in three strips of bacon in the pan, tou cook it all up and you eat it. I'm accomplished at those kind of things, I can feed myself pretty well. I'm slightly mechanical. I'm very analytical, but this situation, I had to surrender. I had to give up and I hate to give up. There's always a way. There's always a way. There is always a path to a successful outcome if you give yourself the grace and the patience and the time to find it, or so I believed a person has got to know their limitations. Am I a guitar player? Nah, not really. Am I a technically proficient guitar player like a Joe Satriani or a Steve Vai, or someone like that who maximizes their use of electronic equipment to manipulate their sound and the simplest things sound insanely wonderful? No, I'm not one of them. But coming to that conclusion and admitting it to myself, it's very difficult because I feel accomplished, I feel skillful, I feel analytical, and I can figure out things. And when those things don't work, I start to question whether I am those things. Maybe you've tried, oh, I don't know, paddle boarding, but you couldn't stand up on it. Maybe you wanted to change your own oil in your vehicle and it just got everywhere and you weren't really sure how to work the the filter wrench and what type of oil do I need, I mean, they've got like seven or eight different kinds. Maybe, maybe, maybe you wanted to go out with a certain person. All you had to do was ask them. And you finally figure out what to say and how to say it, but they say no. They say you are not their type. They don't feel what you feel. They like you, but they don't ‘like’ you like that. How do you handle these things? Not so much the rejection part. I mean, rejection's just a part of. Living, but when you believe that you are capable and you are proven to be incapable because you did not succeed at whatever task it was, then what? Do you, “Keep running up that road, keep running up that hill, with no problems.” No. If you are honest with yourself, you know when to say ‘when’. That ‘when’ means, ah, it's just time to stop. My dad used to quote that Kenny Rogers song, the Gambler, when I would bring things like this up with him: “Gotta know when to hold’em, Know when to fold’em. Know when to walk away, And know when to run. You never count your money While you're sitting at the table. There'll be time enough for countin When the dealing's done.” Know when to hold them. Know when to fold them. Modern translation for The Wanz, your host on WANZOLOGY this week, knowing when to surrender and how to surrender. There are things that no matter how much you think you can do, you can't. Do you surrender? Do you reevaluate? Do you get mad? Disappointed, sad, depressed, frustrated, all of the above? That would be me. And in this state, I came to the realization that I've got to know my limitations. There are things I am not capable of doing. I'm not very good at math, fractions, algebra, hate that stuff, never understood it really. That's okay. There are a lot of things that I'm very good at. I'm good at listening. I'm good at coming up with ideas. And I'm an okay singer. I'm learning how to be a decent guitar player. Something tells me if I turn my attention back to the things I already have done that I know how to do, I should be okay not being able to do things I have never done before. I should be. I can be disappointed without being discouraged. Can you? Can you fail gracefully? That's a challenge for a lot of people, so don't be surprised if it's like a foreign concept, but I've been quoting this phrase that I saw last year, “Either I win or I learn. I never lose.” So now I'm asking myself, what did I learn? And I learned when to surrender, to carry on and push on would only diminish my self-esteem. And for me, that's a huge realization to! Come to know your limitations. Know when to surrender. Surrender's not necessarily giving up as much as it's admitting that at this time, the chances of being successful, they're small. Every day you have a new idea and still you don't succeed. Does that change your perspective on surrender? I can't do this, and that's okay. I was not okay, but now I'm okay because I realize not being able to do this particular thing does not define me. There are plenty of other attributes, plenty of other skills and more opportunities to try things I haven't done before, if I have the courage to try, well, we'll see how that goes. Don't be afraid to surrender. Living to fight another day is better than being lost to the frustration of failure. At least that's how I feel right now. I hope you understand and can relate, and I really, really hope you come back and listen again next week. I'll see you later.