Latest / Wanzology / Hope Is A Good Thing
Transcript
- Hope_Is A Good Thing Ooh bop-she bop, my baby, ooh bop-she bop!! Hey y'all, what's happening? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY! I am your host, The Wanz, and uh, welcome to the Midweek Madness. Yeah-ee-Yuh, the midweek March Madness is just crazy. The world we live in, basketball and all that, it's just nuts! You'll have to pardon me. My blood sugar is just a little off. First, lemme get this out of the way, I hope you and yours are doing well in the midst of what is conservatively labeled complete and total mayhem in the United States of America, PERIOD, END OF STORY!! There are so many things…I am, oh, good God, I'm hanging on by a thread, y'all!! Just kind of maintaining, head above water, that sort of thing. Which brings me to this week's topic. Most people who know me know that my favorite movie is Shawshank Redemption, and they also know that my favorite part of Shawshank Redemption happens pretty much in the last 20 minutes. Andy made Redd promise to go to this certain hayfield out by Buxton if he ever got outta Shawshank. So, Red does that when he finally gets out and finds this wall, the rock that he's supposed to look under and under that rock, he finds a little lunchbox. And in that lunchbox is, is a plastic bag with a envelope in it with money and a letter. Now you hear Andy narrating the letter and the part that always gets me, the part that I always wait for, the one part of the movie that I cherish is when Andy says “Remember Redd, hope, hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies.” That phrase has kept me from doing many, many, many silly or not very intelligent things. “Hope, hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies.” It is very challenging in this day and age to have hope for anything, don't you think? The world is a very, very strange place right now, and it is not easy. Now there are those who will say, “Well, my world hasn't been easy, and ugh, God knows how long!”, and I agree with you. Everybody's life has challenges and how we get through those challenges, everybody does it different, I get that, but do you think that you would be able to maintain your composure and make it through all of those challenges without hope? Do you think that you could pull yourself outta bed every single day, day after day, without hope? Do you think that you navigate your way home from your job or school or whatever and just don't drive 80 miles an hour into a lamppost because you have hope? I do. There was a time in my life where I was quite sure I had to choose between the five or six different ways that I was gonna off myself and unlive myself or kill myself and get off this world. I was raised in a very, very religious setting and I think of life as the ‘weigh station’. It is kind of the proving ground before you get to talk to that St. Peter Guy and figure out whether you're gonna stay up or head on down, 'cause you only got two choices you going to head on up or you going to head on down. You are gonna have an eternity of happiness or an eternity of pain. There is no in-between. I, uh, sincerely hope that you get the first of those choices. You know, all we can do here on this planet, it the ‘weigh station’, as I call it, is the best that we can, but life is life’n! Life is life’n for everybody all at the same time and sometimes, for some people, that's just too much to handle. It's just too much weight to bear and they crack a little bit. Some people just fracture and break. You usually see them on the news in the first 10 or 15 minutes of a newscast, but without hope, how do we make it anywhere? How do we do what we do? I don't see how it's possible that a human being could exist for very long without hope. I think you have hope and you don't even really realize it. I mean, are you sure you're gonna be able to like wake up tomorrow? You are gonna be awake? What happens if you pass in your sleep? What happens if, you wake up and try to move too soon and trip and fall and hit your head on the corner of a dresser and you're gone, life is over. What if your mind and your own business standing on a corner waiting for the light to change and somebody who has the green light has a heart attack or some other kind of medical emergency, swerves to the corner and runs you down, and you're gone? I hope these things don't happen to you. I hope a lot, for not only myself, but for everybody! Even people I don't like. I still hope that they're gonna be okay, and I think that's admirable. Everybody has that certain person that they really could care less about. I have mine, but I still hope that they get through okay. I still hope that life doesn't ‘life’ them into the ground. I still hope that they have a chance every day like I've had, 'cause so far my attendance rate on being alive is 100%. My success rate of getting through very, very challenging and painful things is a hundred percent. So, is it bad that I hope these things for other people? I don't think so. But what happens when you don't have any hope? I had a nephew that I'd. It was the first time I had ever seen someone with absolutely, positively no hope. He thought his life was doomed to be filled with drugs and alcohol. He couldn't find a job, so he was always gonna be poor, he really loved his kids and he loved the woman that he was with, but it was killing him. Just being in that relationship was not good for him 'cause she was driving him. She had expectations and he was not meeting them, and now he's getting it from his significant other and from the inside that he's just not cut out to be here. And it took me a couple of weeks. I checked on him for a couple of weeks to make sure he was still around. I was convinced he was gonna peace out, but he didn't. He ended up getting his act together enough and he joined the service and went through that business and he's got a totally different life now. But man, when you don't have hope, how do you make it? How do you put one foot in front of the other if you don't have hope? My dad used to say, “There are a lot of things in this world I can do without, information is not one of them.”, well I'd have to put hope directly under that, if not before. “Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies.”. It has been said that energy doesn't ever die. It just transforms into something else. The same amount of energy that made the planet is still here on the planet. It's just transformed in a whole bunch of different directions. That's one way of looking at it, I guess. There's no one that knows for sure because nobody knows for sure. But I'll tell you one thing, hope is a nice thing to have in your pocket when you leave, wherever it is that you live. Hope is a nice thing to have when you come home and open the door and there are people there or a pet to greet you, whatever it is that loves on you, when you walk in the door. You hope that life doesn't get too hard and those people that you care about, those people and things that you really care about are unaffected by this world you hope. You get home before the game starts. You hope there's enough in your paycheck that you can take the wife and kids out for ice cream after whatever. You hope that person that always seems to bother you at work took a day off and didn't come by your desk. Hope is a good thing. What would we do without it? What would we do without hope? In the movie, Andy starts the letter. “I hope this letter finds you and finds you well.” I hope that this episode of the podcast finds you in a better state than when it started. That's simple, because Lord knows life is hard. It is challenging. It is so not easy to live in this world at this time, but we made it this far. I don't know about you, but I hope we can go farther. I think we can. Like I said earlier, I have a 100% success rate at getting through things that I thought were going to kill me. Hard times that I thought would break me. Sadness that I thought would completely and totally change my attitude and outlook upon life, but I made it through it, and so did you. Why do you think we did that? Well, that's the easiest question ever. Why did you go through all of that that's in your past? Simple! To get to wherever you are right now. More will be revealed as far as what's next, but I wanna make sure that you're taking a minute to turn around and look at yesterday and the day before and the week before and the month before and the year before that. You had to go through a lot of things, both of us did!! We as humans go through things every bloody day and for every tick of the clock, that's another moment behind us to take on the next moment in front of us. It's not for the faint of heart, it is definitely not for the squeamish, but I like your chances just like I like my chances because I bet you, I bet you betcha, betcha, way down deep where you don't want anyone to see you and I have the same thing, we have hope. Hope that things are gonna get better, and if they're good, hope that they don't get worse. And if they are worse, hope that we get through it so that things can get better. We hope that our family and friends are healthy and stay that way. We hope that the people that we care about will still care about us. It's all based on a belief that, yeah, I'd like that to happen. That we say to ourselves, right? “I'd really like this person to be okay.”, “I'd really like their grandparents to live a lot longer.”, “I'd really like that new bride and groom to be happy for the rest of their lives.”. All of that is hope. I just try to keep things simple. I hope I wake up tomorrow and after I wake up, I hope all five senses work, and if that's a ‘go’, if that's a success, then we'll see what happens. For me, that's the minimum. That is only the price of admission to whatever day it is. Someone used to tell me, “Welcome to the only day of the rest of your life!”, which is kind of morbid, but in a way it's very, very accurate. So I'm gonna leave you with this, hope is a good thing, like it says in the movie, and I don't know whether it's one of the best of things, but is a good thing, and I agree, no good thing ever dies. It may transform into something else, but it's energy that is always here. If your life is a little less today than you wanted it to be, or way more than you hoped it would be today, both of those are good, 'cause if you can realize either one, you're here and being here is kind of kind of important, right? I had a friend who passed away a couple years ago, and she had a saying, maybe you'll say it with a smile on your face when you learn it. She would say, “The best I can hope for is to be reasonably happy, most of the time. The best I can hope for is to be reasonably happy, most of the time.”. Why most of the time? Because you and I both know bad times, good times, neither one of them lasts. From one moment to the next, something's gonna happen. After hearing her say that a couple of times, I started looking at life more like a batting average. I gave up trying to hit home runs. I don't think there's a home run more important than getting the experience that I got from “Thrift Shop”, I don't know. I got kids, I got grandkids, I'm blessed, but I'm telling you couldn't have done any of it without hope. I hope you understand what it means to be reasonably happy most of the time. ‘Cause like a batting average, three outta 10 is really, really good! So, uh, don't get down on yourself if something doesn't work out. Don't get down on yourself if it's still raining. Don't get down. Don't get down unless you're on the dance floor, then you only have to get down for as long as you can get down, right? That's what I'm saying. Thanks for being here, I really appreciate it and I hope good things keep finding you. See you later!