Transcript

The Finish Line · Wanzology

The Finish Line Wha’choo gonna do for me? Oh, wha’cha gonna, Hey, hey! Hi! Hi! How's it going? How's it going with you? For you? I don't know which one to do. Uh, welcome to another staggeringly fabulous episode of WANZOLOGY!! I am your host, The Wanz, wishing health, happiness, and prosperity to every single person listening! Oh man, life is life’n for so many people that I know. Me too. This week's episode, I wanted to talk about an experience that I had last Saturday. Last Saturday I went to a celebration of life for a really good friend of mine that I have known since the summer of my ninth-grade year. He went to another school in the district and it was a music camp that we went to, he was just one of the nicest guys ever. My ninth grade summer in my 10th grade summer we're both spent at this same music camp. It's so weird that, you know, we lived in the same town we never really connected outside of music camp. Then when I went away to college, after about a year, no, after two years, he showed up and was now going to the same college, and I was totally happy. Then he disappeared again. I moved to Seattle and out of nowhere I get this phone call and it's him, it's Adam, my buddy, Adam. And he had gotten my number and was thinking to me and reached out to talk and I said, “Hey, what are you doing?”, and he goes, “Ah, I got, I joined the Air Force!” “Nice. Where are you?” “I'm in North Dakota.” “Okay, what are you doing?” “Well, I can't tell you.”, and I'm like, “Wait, what do you mean you can't tell me?” “No, I can't, I can't tell you, but I was just thinking about you and wanted to, you know, catch up.” So we caught up and he had met a woman, and he thought she was gonna be ‘the one’, and we just reminisced a little bit and that was that. So, I didn't hear from him again for, geez, a decade at least, almost 15 years, and then outta nowhere, I see him on Facebook and he's been living not six, seven miles from me, had joined the fire department, I had one kid, he looked amazing, looked really happy, and I reached out to him, we swore we'd get together, but never did. A couple decades later I see on Facebook, he's been diagnosed with mesothelioma, with cancer. I reached out to him again and didn't hear back from him, and through other friends, found out about a benefit the fire department was having for him, and I went to that and I actually got to see him, which was amazing. It was like being back at college and I walked around the corner and there he was. We didn't get to talk very much, Jesus, 150, 200 people there, and they all wanted to see him. So I stayed out of the way. I tried to keep in touch, but that's how it goes when you're an adult, life is always ‘life’n’ and people get busy. Next thing I know, I get another invitation for another party. Go to that one, and this is where I find out he's terminal and I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what to do, I just showed up because that's kind of what I do, I try to be there for my friends, let's put it that way. I try to be there as best I can. So seeing him getting a picture and a lot of people there, I didn't know because they were his community. Right? And that's fine. I had my time with him. He finally passed away in April of 2025, and his celebration of life was this last weekend. It was at a huge, huge, almost a mega church and the place was filled with representatives from area fire departments. 26 years this kid had done with the fire department and he had built many, and I do mean many relationships. To a man or woman everybody said the same thing, he was the nicest person they had ever met and I'd known that since, geez, I'd known that since the seventies. And as I'm sitting there watching different people give their testimonies and tell stories about him when he was in the Air Force, when he joined the fire department, you know, I sat there thinking about the finish line. All of us have a finite amount of time in our existence, and then we reach the finish line. Some people call it the end of the dash, because on, uh, tombstones you'll see the born date or the born year, and then a dash, and then the death year. And the saying goes, you wanna make the most out of the dash. But I look at it differently. I do, I look at things very differently and to me, the end of a life is not the finish line. To me, the finish line happens on multiple occasions during our lives. We start on so many things when we start to become adults, you know, we have to get a job and then we might meet somebody or we might meet, there's no order to the stuff, we might meet somebody and then we get a job and start a life together, and you forge on ahead and little by little you make these accomplishments. Be it that you find that significant other that you wanna spend the rest of your life with or not, you get that job of a lifetime or not. But either way, you keep pushing forward and you keep striving, you keep running, as it were. We're all running this competition. To me, every single day and sometimes hours within a day is its own little race. I remember when I ran track in junior high school, I wasn't a distance runner, but I could run fast for a little while, so I was a sprinter, and they were teaching us how to lean into the tape. When you get close to the finish line, you wanna lean forward a little bit just to take a couple tenths of a second off your time. Leaning into the finish line has been on my mind since I went to this celebration of life, and I thought about how many times a day do I start a project or work on an existing project? How many times a day do I do chores? How many times do I go through a routine that has a beginning and an end? Anything that has a beginning, a middle, and an end is a process. And for everyone a process is different. Even something as mundane as brushing your teeth, everybody brushes their teeth, or at least they should. And when you do, the process is pretty simple, right? Take out the brush, put the toothpaste on it, some people wet it for some reason, and you start to brush your teeth. You do it up and down, up and down, up and down the top and the bottom, and then the, the top flat surface of the teeth, and then the back and the behind and the upper back and the upper behind, and then you spit all that crap out and you wash your mouth out and you rinse out the brush, you put the brush away and turn the water off and you're done. This is a general overview. I mean, there are details Yes, but generally that's how the process works. So by the time you get to the point where you're spitting out the extra suds and goop and whatever in your mouth, you're rinsing your mouth out and you're rinsing off the brush and you're putting it away and you turn the water off, you have just leaned into the finish line of brushing your teeth. So I started taking that to another degree. I'm walking to the store. It's one finish line to actually get to the store. It's another finish line, getting the stuff that I went to the store for, get through the check line, and then when I get home, it's another finish line and the things that I bought when I put them away, hat's another finish line. You see what I'm doing there? I am of the belief that we, we as humans do not give ourselves enough credit for all the finish lines we reach. We tend to look at that big, overarching ‘my life is…’ and fill in the blank. And if it's not what you thought it would be or what you think it should be, then somehow you feel deficient. You don't feel like you've done anything. And I'm like, “Wait a minute. We all do stuff every day! Some of it we've been doing since we were kids. We don't think about it anymore because we've been doing it for so long, but does that decrease the amount of importance it is to finish that task? Like brushing your teeth? No, I don't think that's diminished at all. I'm sure that most of us have seen that person on the street corner with the little sign begging for change, and they smile and they've got teeth missing. Obviously, they didn't hit the finish line that we hit as consistently as we did, and that was the consequence. We have our teeth, they don't. So what if the task is food? Some people are on an all-day trek to find enough food to have one meal a day, while some of us can just go to the cupboard and take out a bag of Pop-Tarts and go to town. Some of us make sure that our children are fed. Some of us make sure that our parents, our aging parents are getting the nutrition they need and not just eating a bunch of junk. Which is ironic considering when we were kids, all they ever told us was, don't eat a bunch of junk. What I'm trying to get at is you do a lot of things in a day, and when you finish one or two things, do you ‘lean into the tape’? Do you cross the finish line of that task with intention? After you've crossed it, do you turn around and look to see where you came from to get to where you are? Why not if you don't? Every day when I wake up, I take inventory. If all five senses work, I've already had a good day. One, because I know that there are people who didn't wake up. Two, with all my senses, I have a good shot, a good shot at spotting opportunities that will help me do better, help me be better. Better than what? Better than I was yesterday. It took a long time for me to figure out that in this human race, I'm really not in competition with anybody but myself. Everybody else is doing what they're doing, and I spent a long time comparing myself to what other people did, what other people had, opportunities they got and I didn't, and I felt bad about it. I started realizing my life is unique in the sense that I have similarities with a lot of people, but nobody, nobody has my life. And that's the same for you. We're all very unique. Even though with one species of human being on the planet, we all have a great amount of similarities. Break down your day from the time you put your feet on the floor getting outta bed, to the time you pick your feet off the floor and getting into bed. Can you spot how many finish lines you crossed in the course of a day? How many races did you give up on? How many races did you almost finish, maybe you'll start on the race again tomorrow, stage seven of your own version of the Tour de France. Who knows? It all depends on how you wanna think about it. I prefer to think of many finish lines to get to in the course of a day today. One of my finish lines is finishing this episode of the podcast, getting it all edited and posted. Some days I'm late, some days I get it done like two, three days early. That sounded weird. Some days I get it done like two or three ‘days’ early. Yeah, English, it's tough. But I mean, some weeks I get it done early and some weeks I'm scrambling Wednesday morning to try to get it out, but when I say it'll be out, I've learned how to give myself a break and not press myself so hard if I'm running late, maybe I have technical difficulties and couldn't get it recorded correctly. Maybe life just lifed so much I didn't have time to think of what I was going through and the similarity I might have with other people, hence, an episode doesn't get recorded, or maybe I was procrastinating, and I was lazy. Who knows? Whatever day it is that you're hearing this, think about this for a second, whatever day it is, is not like seven days ago. Same day of the week, but it was last week and next week there'll be another day with the same name. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, as the day you're listening to this, but it's not gonna be like THIS day. It's gonna be different. What I'm trying to get at is as we muddle through our lives, there are a series of races that we run. And when we pause or get through with whatever we're doing, we have reached ‘the finish line’. And I guess the goal is to have completed as many races as possible before the whole race is finished and you lean into the tape and cross the finish line like my friend Adam, 'cause he's done, he's done. No more tasks for him, no more labor, no more suffering with cancer, but uh on the other side of that coin, no more hugs from his kids. No more kissing his wife. No more sharing in their lives. The finish line is the finish line, but we get to determine how many finishes we get before we are finished, we get to determine how many races we run, how many we pause, and how many we finish. We also get to choose not to run the race at all. Either way, if you woke up today and you're listening to this, congratulations. Some people don't make it this far. In fact, you could say that every minute of every day that you're alive, because when you've run your final race, time won't matter to you. Run your race, do your best, leave the rest. Help those who are going slower, who may not be strong enough to finish the day or whatever task they're on in that day. The race isn't against them, whoever ‘they are’, the only competition we have really is ourselves. And if you can improve just a little bit from one day to the next, crossing the final finish line I think, will be extremely gratifying. At least I hope so. I'm gonna go forth and try, and I want you to do the same. Do your best, leave the rest. And for God's sakes, don't cut yourself off from other people in your zone when you're racing. Life is kind of a team sport. We don't do it alone. We don't live by ourselves. Treat other people like you'd wanna be treated. If you fall down, it's always great when somebody helps you back up and it feels pretty good when you help somebody else back up just for today. Don't worry about tomorrow, and don't worry about yesterday. Neither one of those things you can mess with anymore. Whatever's right in front of you is the race that you're running, and I really, really hope and pray you're successful at finishing that race. Thanks a lot for tuning in!! I bid you, adieu.