Transcript

Go Have Lunch... · Wanzology

Hi there. How you doing? It is so good to be with you today. Hopefully it's a Wednesday, and even if it's not, it's still one of those days that ends in Y, and you know what that means. Yes. Another episode of Wansology. Yeah. I'm your host, The Wans, coming at you live and direct. Yes, yes, yes. How you doing? You good? Are you all right? How your mama doing? She good? Yep. Yep. My mama good. Dead, but good. I am feeling revived, sort of. Revived and refreshed. I just had lunch with a friend that I haven't seen for at least a couple of years. We haven't been in each other's presence for a while. Both of our lives were extremely busy. They were trying to get a kid graduated, then took that child halfway around the world on the vacation of a lifetime, came back, and then they both got to setting themselves up for what's next in life. So there was a lot of catching up to do. It was amazing for me. When I first met this person, it was this person and their son. It was questionable how either one of them was going to, quote-unquote, "make it" in this world. As time went by, we talked a lot, all three of us, not always together, but most times separately, about what's going on with you. What's happening? What do you want? When do you want it? What are you gonna do to get it? Questions that we ask ourselves all the bloody time, right Well, I can tell you it's been, been a little over a decade I have been connected with them and vice versa, and let me tell you, if you ever, ever think that someone isn't listening to you, stop thinking that, because they are. They're mainly trying to figure out how they can do something like what you did, but not exactly because they're not you, but they do listen to what you say, and this is the thing that I thought was amazing. This person and I sat and had a very, very nice lunch, two hours of yapping and yapping and yapping about the difference between what it was like and what it's like now. You wanna know what it is. What is it that I speak of? What it was like before and what it's like now, how we look at life You can learn a lot from just having a brief conversation, sometimes more than brief, with a long-lost friend, even an acquaintance that you used to roll with. They know you pretty well, at least they used to know you, and then they compare what you used to be like to what you are like now, and you do the same thing. You can learn, learn, learn a lot During the course of this lunch, we talked about what we were afraid of, things that challenged us, and why we chose to keep ourselves from obtaining things that we knew we could get. Why did we choose to live in our fear rather than our abilities? Why did we choose not to try even though that is the one thing we both knew we controlled? Don't know. Different situations, different circumstances, always different reasons. But the similarity is we both had our fears. Mine were, "What's gonna happen next? Now that I've been here, how do I get to there, and how close to the there that I want will I be?" For this other person, it wasn't getting from there to the next there. It was, "Oh my God, how am I gonna do any of it?" This person was so, so sensitive. They were afraid of messing up everyone and everything around them, isolating for fear of knocking over whatever. And the more I listened, the more confused I got. And I asked, "Well, what were you afraid of?" "Oh, I don't know. I just, I just didn't wanna mess things up." "You mean you didn't wanna make a mistake?" "No, I did not wanna make a mistake." Heaven forbid a human being not make a mistake. So I went back over one or two of the mistakes and I asked, "What'd you learn?" "Well, I learned that I could do A, B, and sometimes C." And I said, "Great. What else did you learn?" "Um, uh, I don't know." And I said, "You learned how to try. Not that you could succeed, but you learned how to try." "Well, yeah, maybe that's it." "You learned how to squish your fear enough that you could try, make an attempt at whatever it is that you were trying to do." And they said, "Well, I, I guess so." And I said, "Well, why do you have to guess? You were there. You knew what was going on. You knew what the objective was, and you took action towards that objective." "Well, yeah, I guess." "Did you succeed?" "No, not all the time." "Perfect," I said. "You're not supposed to Then we went on to talking about my kids, their kid, families, and the relationships with them, and how much this other person's family members are leaning on them. Just leaning, leaning, leaning hard on them. My friend really doesn't know how to navigate this. I suggested ask questions. What do you hope to gain from me telling you? What do you hope to accomplish by asking me what you're asking me? What makes you think that I know any more than you do? The answers will be surprising. Most times, people aren't really sure of their own thoughts, so they wanna check against your thoughts just to make sure that they're not off the mark, or in my case, crazy. It's not that there's a lack of confidence. It's a fear of not being able to execute. Failure to launch for fear of failing. To which I always ask the same thing: Well, how do you think you learned anything? How did you learn how to walk? You crawled, pulled yourself up on things, tried to take a step, boom, on the booty you fell, but you kept doing it. And now you don't think about falling much, do you? How did you learn how to talk? Well, you started out pretty crappy, and then you kept trying and learning and failing and not saying the word kumquat quite correctly. I always had a lot of problems saying aluminum. I would say alumumum, al-mumumum. But with practice, I now can say aluminum. But that's what life is like. When we didn't know how to do something, we were given, I don't know, call it a path, call it a direction. We were given guidance, some sort of instructions to get us started toward the success or failure of whatever it was. Now, if we fail, we go back and see or try to see why we failed. If we succeed, well, if one is good, two has to be better, right? So we do it again. Maybe not exactly right at the same moment, but we always end up repeating ourselves. Things that work, especially things that work well, you ever notice you don't really think about how to do 'em anymore. Perfect example, brushing your teeth, tying your shoelace. When's the last time you put on your socks inside out? See what I mean? You get good at something and you stick with it. You keep doing it. Well, how do you get good at it? You fail. You fail Riding a bike without training wheels. Did you fall the first time? Some people do. Did you pass your driver's test on the first try? Did you get into the school that you wanted to after high school, or did you get the job that you wanted to get after high school? Did you ever ask that person out that you were so, so, so enamored with that it scared you to death if they ever talked to you? These are only a few of the things that this person and I talked about. We did it over a nice, casual, relaxed meal. I suggest in your travels, find that person that you used to be tight with but you're not anymore. Ask them what they're doing and see if you can go have lunch or dinner or breakfast, whatever your meal of choice is. But you need to spend time with a person that you haven't spent time with for a while. Why? Because they knew you and you knew them. You need to get to know them again, and vice versa. They need to get to know you During the course of my recovery, I was asked, "If you get lost five miles into the woods, how far do you have to come out?" Five miles. Made sense. But I had to add something to that. Sure, you have to go the same distance. It could be five miles, it could be two miles. You have to go the same distance out as you did in, but the experience will change you, and that's the important part. You get lost in the woods. How'd you get lost? Uh, I, I don't know. I went this way and I went that way, and then all of a sudden I didn't know where I was. Well, how did you figure out where you were? Well, I really never did. I turned around and started going back the way that I thought I came, and then I saw familiar things, and pretty soon I was not lost anymore. I knew where I was You know, that same logic works with your life. It works with your relationships. It works with a lot of things. None of us always gets it right the first time. None of us. We are human beings, y'all. We are bound to make mistakes, and the question will always be: what do you learn from your mistakes? How will you apply what you've learned to the next time you're in a similar circumstance? What I've learned is life is very cyclical, meaning it goes in a circle. There are things that happen to you in middle school, junior high, that happen to you again in high school, that may or may not have happened to you in college or after high school. And now, if you're any kind of an advanced adult, like in your forties and fifties, oh yeah, there are lots of things that have happened over and over again. Sometimes you're successful at getting through them, and sometimes it's all you can do to get through them and keep a shred of not only your decency, but your courage. It takes a lot. It takes a lot to get through life. So if you're listening to me, I want you to first realize that you didn't get to where you are by accident. You knew a few things today when you started Yesterday you knew a few things when you started, and you got all the way to the end of yesterday, else you would not be here today. Some people don't make it as far as you have. Some people didn't wake up today. So what does that mean? What that means is you have the ability to evolve just like every living thing. The best way to gauge that is to spend some time with someone you haven't spent time with for a while. It'll make you feel good. It'll make you grateful, I betcha. I betcha you'll come away feeling a lot better than you did going in simply because it's just been too long since you caught up with that person. That was my experience. I hope it's yours. It seems like our lives just fly by at the slowest pace ever. But when we look back, oh crap, spring wasn't that long ago. Oh crap, winter was not that long ago. But three winters ago? Well, compared to ten winters ago, not that far back. Same thing works in the course of a day. Two hours ago, way different than five hours ago. And if you're at the end of the day, go back twelve hours and look at what you were doing and how you got from there to where you are right now. What did you learn? Who did you learn it from? Did you make any mistakes so that you had the opportunity to learn? It has always been and always will be amazing to me that there is only one species of human being on the planet, yet we have so many different ways of doing the same thing We encompass it in one big bag called living. Nobody lives the same way you do, and vice versa. Even if you're a twin, an identical twin, you're not exactly like that person. You're your own person. When we share our experiences with each other, we learn. We either learn how to do something better, not to do something 'cause it'll be worse, but most of all, we learn that we're not unique. None of us are. Billions of people on the planet and not one person is like the other. There are similarities, but there are a lot of differences as well. When we focus on the similarities, I believe we do better. I believe we learn more. I believe that as a people, we evolve. So go out and have lunch with someone you haven't had lunch with for a long time. Talk about the old days. Talk about the days before the old days. Talk about yesterday and what you're gonna do or what you'd like to do tomorrow. That's all I got. I hope you picked up what I was putting down, and mainly, I really, really, really hope that you enjoy where you're at right now. Thanks for listening. Check you later