Transcript

Reality is... · Wanzology

Reality Is… La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Hey, what's going on? Welcome to your Wednesday again, still, just keep in mind this Wednesday is so not like last Wednesday, and we'll definitely not be like next Wednesday. It's just Wednesday. So, uh, carry on. Hi, I am your host, The Wanz welcoming you to another episode of WANZOLOGY! Ah, ahhhh, I hope you're well. I hope those that you care about are well, and well, let's get on with it. So it's no surprise or it should be no surprise I, I do a lot of 12 step work. I'm a happy go lucky member of a couple of 12 step groups, and in one of them we had a very, very interesting topic. The topic was reality. By itself that really doesn't mean a lot to some people reality, but in this particular setting at that particular time, it really got me thinking, what is my reality right now? What is the difference between those things that I can control versus the things that I can't control and the consequences of that little paradox right there. There are a lot of things in this world that you have no control over. Persons, places, things, situations, they happen, right? Life is circumstantial. I've been beating that drum for a little while now. Everybody's going through different circumstances at the same time. Now, they may be similar to yours. They may resemble circumstances that you had been in and you handled it one way and they handled it another, or are handling it another way. But the fact remains, this condition humans have called living is based on reality. The reality is this, we are reactionary beings based on our wealth of knowledge learned. Said another way, I had a psychiatrist tell me, “At any given time, we are the sum of all our experiences.” Now I take that to mean from the time that you can remember to the present, everything that has happened to you, is a part of you. Every word you've said, heard, every nick scrape, cut, every tear of joy or sorrow is a part of you. It makes you who you are. That being said, reality is challenging. How can you manage reality if you don't control reality? The answer is you don't. Like I said, humans are a reactionary bunch. We can react to things and not even realize that we are reacting. We don't control what's going to happen or what's happening. We get to control how we react or respond to whatever's happening in any given moment. You ever been driving down the freeway and all of a sudden traffic slows down? Everybody's like crawling, and you know that there's an accident up ahead because you can see the red and blue flashing lights and everybody's trying to merge over into a lane trying to move out of the way and everybody going through slow, just going slow, slow. So you get your place in line and you go slow, and by the time you get to where the accident is, it's pretty well been cleaned up. Whoever was injured has been taken away in an ambulance. The tow truck has the damaged vehicle or vehicles hooked up and they're leaving. So why is traffic moving so slow? Because everybody wants to see. That's why if you don't wanna see, you don't really get a choice because everyone around you does, especially the people in front of you. And it's frustrating because you realize there's nothing to see anymore. Can we get going, please? Well, no, not, not until you're a good a hundred, 200 yards past the accident and ahead of you is laying after laying of open highway. But for a moment, it was crazy frustrating that you had to sit and wait. You had to try to merge or let somebody in so everybody could move forward and you just crawl and crawl and crawl into taking up time, time, time, but you really had no control over the situation at all. The only thing you had control over is how you react to the situation. Some people react badly and lean on that horn. Yeah, how well was that working for you? Maybe you're one of those people who is cursing in the car, just four letter-expletives everywhere, just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you're the only one in the car. How effective was that approach? Yeah. Something's gonna happen to you, me, people you love, people you don't love, something's gonna happen and we are going to react or respond. Because we really can't stop what's going to happen. Nobody tells the future. You think you do? “Ohhhhh, I think, I think if I pick these six numbers, I will win billions of dollars!” Negative, negative, negative, negative. Or maybe all I have to do is put this little widget here and then take this other widget from this thing put it here. Look, I've invented something that nobody else has, and you take it to the patent office only to find out that you're 347th in line with the very same thing, or this is the really good one you're gonna go grocery shopping and you're in the parking lot and you are going down one way and you see a parking space in the lane to the left. So you get down to the end, wait for pedestrians to move, and then you circle around and as you are coming up the lane, somebody was there before you coming the wrong direction and they back it into the space. What are you gonna do? Get out and yell at them? Reality is what it is. As humans, we, we try to characterize things. We try to make the best out of things. Most of us I think, I think most of us want to have a pleasurable existence, so we, we really kind of focus on the good things that happen. You open up the fridge and, uh, there's still a water left or, “Wow! Leftovers from yesterday. It was so good. It's gonna be really good now!!”, or “I'm really glad I mowed the grass yesterday 'cause it's raining today. or washed the car or vacuumed or helped my kid. The reality is we only have one chance in a given moment to do something. Doing something is the cog, it's the main wheel of life. Life is a verb. It happens, but how do you deal with how you see what's happening? Are you honest with yourself? Are you projecting whatever you don't like onto somebody else? Just because you see a person sitting on the sidewalk next to the exit to the grocery store with a little sign that just says, “hungry” on it, do you, uh, start to feel some sort of way? Are you sad? Are you angry, frustrated? How about disgusted. That's their circumstance, not yours. But what if you were them? What if, what if life happened in such a way that you lost almost everything, like somebody's abode caught on fire and it caught your abode on fire and you lost everything that you owned? Now you're out on the street 'cause you can't afford to stay anywhere else. You can't afford to buy anything. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? The reality is you're going to do whatever you want to and this is the great truth. The great truth of being human is you always do what you think you should do. Regardless of who does whatever, who says whatever you're going to do, whatever it is that you think you should do now, can you live with the result of that? Good or bad? Can you? There are those who can't. There are those who will always say, “Well, it would've worked out if it hadn't been for…”, and then they'll shift the blame, even though they were the one who made the choice. They're the ones who made the choice that didn't work out or say it does work out better than you thought it would this choice you made, well then do you share any of that goodness that you've now experienced with anybody else? Do you share your experience, the choice that you made, why you made it? Giving someone else the opportunity to maybe recognize a similar circumstance and having an option to choose because of your choice. Happening at any given moment is reality. Reality is, for lack of a better way of putting it, it's how things really are, not how we think they are. You can think that 60 degrees Fahrenheit is cold, but that depends on where you live in this world, doesn't it? There are some places that never get to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. There are places that never get down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Those are just different realities, but yours, yours is your own. If you're like me and you have a magnificent magnifying mind, you try to make it into something you feel as if you have a bit of control over. “I control my life. I can do what I want!”, no, you can't! You can't fly like Superman. No. You are human. Humans have deficiencies. Flaws, foibles. They are not always right. These humans, and as long as you have two eyes in the front, a nose in the middle, and two ears as handles on the side of your head, you're a human and you're just as flawed as any other human, which is not a bad thing. When we were five years old, there were a lot of things that we couldn't do. We couldn't make our own meal. Maybe we couldn't ride a bicycle. We couldn't draw very well. We couldn't use a computer to type out a dissertation or a recipe. We couldn't give very good directions at five years old, at 10 years old, lots of things improved. Maybe you learned how to cook something. Maybe you were able to be home by yourself for a day, but you couldn't drive, you couldn't rent a car. Hell, you might not even be able to take public transit. That was your reality. Now you're 20 and there are still things you can't do. Now you're 30 and there are things you can't do. 40, 50, 60, there are things you still can't do. Reality is exactly what it is. The trick is, can you be cool with your reality right now? Can you recognize the options, the choices that you do have, and be optimistic that they're gonna work out or lead you to another lesson to learn? Or do you just badmouth the whole situation that you're in thinking your luck is bad. Or that person doesn't understand. That job wasn't any good. That fool didn't see me and hit my car. They just left me and didn't explain why. The reality is always the truth with all of us, and that truth is how we see things, how we perceive our world, our circumstance determines how we either react or respond and the difference between a reaction and a response is time. The longer you take to make a choice, the odds are that it will be a better choice than if you just knee jerk react to something. Information. It's a thing Pops used to say all the time, “There are a lot of things in this world I can do without. Information is not one of them.” So I suggest, and it's just a suggestion, you're gonna do what you want anyway, I suggest that you gather as much information as possible about whatever is going on around you, ponder that information and make the best choice that you can. And regardless of how that choice pans out, stand by it. Learn from it. Good or bad, there's a lesson in there if you're paying attention. Either way be real, 'cause life is real, it's happening! Just make sure that you remember your reality isn't happening in a vacuum. You are not by yourself. Something can happen on the other side of the planet in someone else's reality. It can come and affect yours. Okay, cool. Oh, let's get real. Let's get, let's get real!! I'm gonna go be real now and I'll see you next week. Peace and hair grease. Peace and hair grease…sing that song, boy!!!