Transcript

Evidence II · Wanzology

Evidence II La-dee-dah-dee-dah-dee!!! Hey, how you doing? Nice to be with you again. Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY, I'm your host, The Wanz, putting on a brave face because it's a terrible, terrible world out there. I'm saying it! Telling you the truth, I am!! But we're getting through it, right? Right! Um, I don't know about all y'all, but some days are more difficult than others when it comes to navigating the in and out of the day to day. I have a proposition for you and that proposition I've probably mentioned before, so that's why I put the ‘two’ after the title. My proposition is this, it's highly possible that you are forgetting the evidence you already have. What does that mean? The evidence you already have. What that means is if you've made it this far to listen to this podcast or whatever else you've done today, that means everything behind you is evidence. Your past, the most useful tool as far as learning lessons is concerned is your past. Yes. Yes! Remember when you couldn't ride a bicycle? Do you remember you were not very good at putting on makeup at first, or maybe you had trouble tying your shoes, or you had difficulty with English or math. You didn't understand why those boys pulled your hair and made fun of your teeth. It's all evidence. Everything that we've been through, everything that has happened in our lives has registered and taken up a spot somewhere in our body. There's a fabulous book called ‘My Grandmother's Hands’, it describes how trauma can be stored in the body and even be transferred from generation to generation. At this juncture of my world, this particular time that I'm making this recording, there are mysteries. I have questions. I don't understand a lot of things. In order for me to be able to understand a lot of things, I figured out that I need to go back and research my evidence. I haven't felt this defeated in a long time. I haven't felt this down in the mouth for a long time. I haven't felt like I really don't know what I'm doing for a long time, and that's not good. Every time you leave your front door, you're going somewhere, you have an idea of where you're gonna go. I call it a destination. Very few people leave there abode without a destination, even if it's just going out for a walk. Even if it's just to go out to the front steps, you have a destination. Now when you don't have a destination, that's one thing. When you have multiple destinations, that's where life gets interesting. Strange things happen when you have multiple things that you wanna complete in the course of a given time period, like say business hours, 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM business hours, generally speaking. There are a ton of things that you may or may not want to get done, but if one of those things takes longer than expected, that leaves less time for the others. Say you have four things, four tasks that you want to complete in three different areas of town. Well, if the first one you go to takes twice as long as you expected, that takes away time you have to complete the others. It takes forever to get there. Then you have even less time to complete whatever that task, that next in line task is. It took you 40 minutes longer to get to it than usual or then you had planned, so what do you do? You adapt. I have a concept called time compression, and that is when there's not enough time to complete the tasks that I have set out for myself. Everybody has a list right in their head or written down, maybe in the notes on your phone or whatever of things that they would like to do in the course of a day. Grocery shopping, shoe shopping, go pay this bill, go do this, go visit that person and then come home. Great. So which do you do first? Well, you figure that out. You make a little note of how you wanna complete things, but if that person isn't home and you can't visit them, do you go back to finish another task? If all your other tasks are done, and that last thing is to visit somebody and they're not home, do you just go home? Or do you call an audible and make up something to do, someplace to go? Time compression, when you start running out of time to complete your tasks. It's annoying. If you look back on, I would say, hmm, high school, you went through time compression, all the bloody time! Every day you got to school, there were certain things that needed to be done. It didn't seem like you had enough time to do 'em all in between your classes. Then it was go home and maybe you had homework, but then you had chores that you needed to do before you could do your homework, or you were gonna put off your homework because you wanted to hang out after school, which left you less time to do your homework. And so here you are, late in the evening with a parent chirping in your ear, “Why didn't you do that earlier?”, “Well, I was busy.” “Busy with what?” You can't tell 'em the truth because you know what'll happen, you have evidence. You got through it, right? Well, that's the thing. The thing about today, the best thing about today is all the things that we've already been through. I call that evidence. I got it from a therapist that I was seeing for a while and I really didn't understand it, and I really didn't believe it until I really started taking a hard look at some of the things that I had been through, especially the things that had repeated. When I say repeated, I don't mean like Déjà vu, “Wow! This seems familiar!” No, no, no, no, no. I mean, when you feel a certain way again. You felt it before and now you're feeling it again. You remember when you felt it before, but you don't always remember what you did after feeling it. And therein lies the rub, because if you learn something right, you can remember, you can recall, hopefully, your thoughts and actions and the same things will hopefully apply and you can just use that experience, AKA evidence, to get you through what you're going through right now. Well, what if you can't remember? What if it happened so long ago that you're not sure of the details? What about misremembering? You thought it was one way when in truth it was another? This is the thing with humans, we are brilliant, but we are not always accurate, and that can cause problems. If you're not paying attention, or you don't have a good buddy system established, you could really screw yourself by repeating a mistake in a situation that you've been in before. But you do the best that you can, right? Right. What happens if this occurrence that had happened before was painful and you remember the pain and you remember it took a long time to get through the pain? You swore you were never gonna do that again. You were never gonna follow those same steps. You were never gonna repeat those same words. You were never gonna be around those same people or in that same place. Yet you find yourself in the same place pain wise. Not necessarily with the same person, not necessarily the same situation, but similar enough that your body remembers the pain, and you remember the pain and you feel some sort of way about it. What do you do then? Look at the evidence. Is the pain you felt the same as, I don't know, when you're in your twenties and the person that you're dating is sleeping around and you didn't know until yesterday, is that the same kind of pain? And what about the pain of being married and find out that your significant other is homosexual? How's that? There are a myriad of things that happen in a person's life. But here's the thing, if you can find a relational connection to the feelings, that is your first clue of what you're going to do, not what you could do, what you're going to do. It doesn't matter if this feeling that you have now is the same as a feeling that you got 20 years ago, you just know more things to do now, in addition to what you are going to do. You made it all this way from way back there through all the pain, through all the crap, through all the challenges, here you are. So why again do you think you can't make it through whatever you're going through right now? You have evidence that you can. Someone told me, “You know, you have survived every bad thing that has happened to you in your life at any given moment.” For me, it is very, very instructive, because if I'm honest with myself, I can go back and see what I did before. Have I tried this solution? Did I do these things to get out of whatever rut I was in? Did I do some other things to remind me so I wouldn't make the same mistake again? Evidence. Evidence equals learning. We learn, especially when things are painful, we learn. We learn not to put our hands in certain places. We learn not to say certain things to our parents. We learn not to say certain things to our boss or a police person. We learn, because we have experience. Not everybody has your experience and you don't have everybody else's experience, but, there are similarities and THAT is key! You have a circle of besties, maybe one, maybe three, maybe five, and all of you have come up through a certain period of time having a shared experience with each other. They know how you feel. They know what you went through. They know everything. So why don't you ask them? If you are in a spot like I am, I have financial challenges. I have mental challenges, I have physical challenges, and my brain has been working against me and makes it very hard for me to complete things these days, but I'm working on it, because I've been here before. I've felt like things are pointless before. I’ve felt like the sun will NOT come out tomorrow, and I don't even have a ‘bottom dollar’ to bet. I remember what it felt like before, I can compare it to how it feels now. Now what do I do? Well. At any given time, I'm going through the ‘tape’, man. I'm trying to recall, “What did I do?”, “How did I do that? “, “What got me in a better mood?’, “What changed my outlook on life? Did I pray? Did I read from a big book 'cause I needed to bolster up my spiritual condition? Did I hang out with a certain person? Did I go to a certain place?”, You have all these same solutions. They make up the evidence of how you got from back behind you, no matter how far, to where you are. And I'll leave you with this, I say it all the time, turn around and look from where you came from. You had to go through all of that to get to this in the here and now, and you'll have to go through this, to get to whatever is out there, Whatever that is, that's next. Every second of every day, we are supposed to be learning, paying attention, storing the evidence so that we have it in case we need it. Some of it you can't throw away. That's why everybody remembers a bad haircut. That's why everybody remembers a bad date. It's why everybody remembers bad food. You don't wanna repeat those things, but you had to go through all of ‘that’ to get to ‘this’, and you’ll have to go through ‘this’ to get to ‘that’, whatever ‘that’ is. While you're waiting for what's next, look back on where you've come from and use what you already have, evidence. Alright, thanks a lot!! I appreciate you being here and I hope that you will come back again next Wednesday because if it's Wednesday, it's time for a new episode of WANZOLOGY!! Get on out there, git’it!! Git’it, Mayne!!! GET IT ALL!!!! Later!!