Latest / Wanzology / Emotional Independence
Transcript
- Emotional Independence Yahddy-dahddy, yah dah da-dahddy, yah dah dah-dee, yah dah da-dah!! Hi!! Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!! I'm your host, The Wanz, and I am coming to you live and direct from the upper left-hand corner of the United States of America!! How ya doing? You good? Crazy? I'm always kinda crazy some way, shape, or form. I'm a little off, as they say, just a little. Oh, it is almost Independence Day, the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, and man, there are problems, there are challenges. I don't know how we're gonna make it, but I know we are. You're gonna make it. I'm gonna make it. We're all gonna get through it. It'll be fine. No, it won't be fine because yes, I remember FINE stands for F'd up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical!! If you're anything like me, you try very hard not to be ‘fine’. Fine is bad. Let's just say we're gonna try to be okay with everything. Okay meaning we're gonna get through it, yes!!! Independence Day, the day we separated as a country from England. But that word independence has sort of lost its shine. It has sort of lost its purpose because it has changed definition, and I wanna talk about personal independence. We can be independent from a lot of things. We can be independent in our thoughts, actions, we can be independent in our deeds and our faith, we can be independent in almost every human characteristic you can think of. But the question is, how good is that? How good is it to be independent? The definition of independence is the “state of being self-reliant and free from external control. It encompasses both national sovereignty, where a country governs its own territory, and personal autonomy, the ability of an individual to make self-directed choices, manage their own life, and achieve financial or emotional self-sufficiency.” That last part, “The ability for an individual to make self-directed choices, manage their own life, and achieve financial or emotional self-sufficiency.”, that's what we're shooting for. That's the goal. That's the North Star that guides us, right? When we say we want to be independent, we want to control our own autonomy. We wanna be in that state of self-reliance and free from external control. External control, meaning somebody telling you what to do or something telling you you can't do something. Remember when you were a kid and you were too short to go on a ride? You couldn't go. Nobody was gonna let you go. You couldn't go. Nobody was gonna make an exception, well, not often, but you couldn't go. You couldn't drive. You couldn't stay out all night when you were a kid. Hell, depending on how old you were, you couldn't even put something in the micro and make yourself something to eat. It was a tough, tough gig being a kid. But as you got older and you learned how to do things, when to do things, and more importantly, why to do things, circumstances began to change. You were given responsibility. You were trusted with responsibility. Remember when you had your own key to the house? Life before having a key to the house was a little restrictive, wasn't it? Remember when the ‘ancient ones’, otherwise known as the parents, said, "We're gonna be home late. You'll have to fix yourself something to eat." The whole kitchen, pantry, root cellar, all of it was yours! “I wanna have cereal! Forget that eating fruit crap!!” Now, as you got a little older and you started associating with other children from other households who themselves were learning their own level and style and flavor of autonomy, you would meet at school and compare notes and say, "Well, I can do this and I can do that." "Oh, my parents won't let me do that." "Yeah? Well, my parents will let me do that and this." And you thought they were lucky 'cause they could do things that you couldn't. You got a little older and learned ‘the system’. What's the system? You remember the system. The parent controlled everything having to do with ‘the system’. But the older you got, the more you were asked, and sometimes required, to help govern the system, especially if you had younger siblings, then you had to learn how to be responsible. If you passed, if you were successful in being responsible, you were trusted, and you could get more of that controlling stuff. As you got older, now you have a vehicle to be responsible for. Now you're taking people in that vehicle, and you're responsible for all of them. See how it starts to grow? Maybe you go off to college and you find you have to really, really be way different. You have to be a way different flavor of self-reliant. You have to be autonomous in a way that you never thought you had to be before because now you are conflicted. Those other people can do that. Oh, I don't think I better do that, 'cause in the back of your head is mom going, "Well, if Billy jumps off a bridge, are you gonna do what he does and jump off the bridge too?" Or you hear the other parent, "Well, just because Carla has a pony doesn't mean that you're gonna get one." These are all learning steps. We navigate them. We learn, through trial and error, what works and what doesn't. So by the time we reach middle age, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, somewhere in that range, we're pretty well set. We pretty much know the limits of our autonomy, but we may not be independent. We may still be totally tied to a job we don't like, a person we don't like, family we tolerate but deep down we don't like, or separation from family that we do like. All of our circumstances keep changing and evolving, and the decisions that we make, every single one of them, determines how much more personal autonomy we have, how much more emotional self-sufficiency we have built, how much less we are self-reliant or free from external control. All this learning stuff can work both ways. You can learn to be completely independent, or you can learn to be somewhat independent, sorta independent, or just reliant. I believe that everyone has that core belief that they can be self-reliant. They can be independent of everything and everyone. Well, almost everything. There are certain rules that we still have to abide by. Gravity. There are certain things that we just stay in the lines and we use different colors, and we've seen what happens to those who go outside of those lines, and we don't wanna be them. But that's a whole 'nother topic. What I'm talking about is, are you at a point in your life where you realize your next decision might be one of the most important decisions that you make for just you, your self (two words). The next decision that you make could determine whether you are happy, sad, angry, glad, confused, any number of emotions, because those emotions will come as a result of whatever choice you make, because once you make a choice and you act on that choice, there are consequences, which are not always bad, right? There are good consequences. You're starving, and you know what? You figure out that you have a ‘20’ in your pocket. You hit the drive-thru and you get something to eat, and no longer are you hungry, problem solved. Or you wake up one day and that wonderful car that you love so much, it has been repossessed. It's gone These are consequences, but they are also tests of independence, self-reliance. We are now living in an age of the United States of America where true independence is constantly tested against reliance and dependence. Reliance and dependence on things other than what we know to be right. I just spent the day processing one of the most asinine things ever. The Supreme Court made a ruling on the 14th Amendment and its citizenship clause. It's one of the most simple things ever. I challenge you to go read it. Look it up, “14th Amendment Citizenship Clause”, and just read it. When you're done, ask yourself, do you understand what that means? It's a yes or no question. There's no maybes. Either you understand it or you don't. To me, it was extremely simple because of the word “persons”. Didn't say male, didn't say female, didn't say child, didn't say Caucasian, didn't say brown skin, didn't say yellow skin, it said person. This actually was debated before the Supreme Court because there are some who believe there shouldn't be a citizen created when that person is born in this country. When someone is born in this country, they are automatically made a citizen, and there are people who are against that for some ungodly reason. But that's another topic. What I started figuring out is that there is a serious section of humanity in the United States that doesn't want you to be independent, that doesn't want you to be self-reliant. They want you to fend for yourself, but they don't want you to be self-reliant or free from external control. Oh boy, do they wanna make sure they control you. If you don't have the money, you have no control. The less money you have, the less control over what you do, say, all of it. That's not independence. Independence comes from inside of whoever you are. You think how you like, you decide how you like, you act how you like, and then you are grown enough to accept whatever consequences, good or bad, come from the action that you chose to make. Why earn something when you can steal it? Well, because if you steal it and get caught, there are consequences. Why work for a living when you can just be dependent on someone else? Well, because that someone else could leave you or die, and then you'd be what I call ‘ass end out’. Nobody can cross the street for you, I told one of my sons. You're gonna have to stand at the corner, look at the light, and when the light says you can go, look both ways, traffic looking safe, you, you gotta walk. Nobody's gonna carry you to the other side of the street. That's the process we use in almost everything. We gather information, we make a decision, we act on that decision, and then we accept the consequences that came because of the action. It's simple. Don't think so? Go get a small cup of water and put it on a counter and just watch it. Count to 20. Nothing happens, right? Now, same cup of water, tip it over and count to 20. Do you get all the way to 20? Probably not because you're worried about all the liquid that was inside the cup is now spilled everywhere, and you don't want it to keep spreading, so you do something. That doing something, it's another action that you take in response to the consequence of the water coming out of the cup. See what I did there? We have personal autonomy, personal responsibility, which is a lot like national sovereignty, which is a lot like self-sufficiency. All these things we already have, but you have to believe that you know how to do them. And if you're not sure, are you willing to try to find out where your limits are? Are you willing to see how much you are free from external control? How independent are you? Are you situationally independent or are you always independent? If you have a best friend or a significant other or a spouse, how dependent on them are you? Conversely, how considerate are you about how independent they are? It seems very complicated, but it's really not. We humans do a lot of things just by instinct, just because that's what we learned. So if you are in a state of non-autonomy, if you feel like you're not in control, which you really never are, believing you're in control is like believing you can hold a puff of smoke. You're not in control. You control how you react. You control how and what you decide you're going to do next in this world of outside stimuli. The better that you do it without anyone telling you, the better you're being self-reliant, the freer you are from external control. And I'll leave you with this. One of my favorite movies, Magnum Force by Clint Eastwood. He plays Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry, finds himself pitted against four motorcycle cops and a renegade lieutenant who want to remake the whole police department, and he's standing in the way. All the officers come after him, and one by one, they are vanquished, and then it's just him and the lieutenant. The lieutenant is gonna take a car that they drove down to this dockyard in, back to the station, tell everyone, "You are through, Callahan. I'm gonna make sure that you are arrested and tried with the very system that you stand up for. No one's gonna believe you, Harry. They'll believe me. I'm a respected law officer. You, you're a bum!" He gets in the car, and he drives away. As he starts to drive away, he doesn't realize that there was a bomb in the car, and the bomb goes off!! Dirty Harry looks at the camera and kinda does this weird little smirk and says, "Man's got to know his limitations." I've always taken that to mean I have to know my limitations. There are things that I can do and things that I can't do. There are things that I could try and find out if I can do them or not, and there are things that I just won't try because I know the consequence is more than I can handle. I know my limitations. Know your limitations. Go and claim your self-reliance. Separate yourself a little at a time from external control. Make your own self-directed choices and manage your life so that you can achieve financial and, most of all, emotional self-sufficiency. That's really, really, really important I really like your chances 'cause you made it this far. So don't stop now. Keep going!!! I'll look for you next week, but until then, la, la, la, later. Bye!!!