Becoming
Are we live? Are we live? We are live!! Hey, how you doing? Welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY, I am your host, The Wanz!! It is another Wednesday, 'cause I like dropping these things on Wednesday. Gives me plenty of days to relax and then a little bit of padding time so that I can understand and figure out what the heck I'm gonna talk about.
I was sitting in a group of people today and we were talking about being gentle, being gentle. That's kind of a goofy subject for me because I've been hearing all my life, “Why are you talking to me so mean? What's wrong? Are you mad? Why do you sound so angry?”
Well, I don't sound angry to me, and I don't know why I sound angry to you, but what I do know is that, that's kind of a problem, so I needed to fix that. Today was kind of an eye-opening experience that for a couple days I'm gonna spend a little time working on being gentle. How does one do that? What does that mean, being gentle? You all know what ‘gentle’ means, and y'all know what ‘being’ means, so being gentle would be kind of an action, wouldn't it? The question is the circumstances in which being gentle becomes number one, attractive, number two, necessary. Because usually if you're me, you always end up at number three, which is completely ignored, not intentionally, it just kind of ends up that way.
Practicing self-compassion is kind of a thing, not just these days, but it has been for a long time. Growing up underneath a military style father, gentle was, hmm, hard to come by sometimes. Not that, you know, that's his fault, that's not his fault. You can't really expect a lion to be all calm, cool, and collected all the doggone time, especially when your son is being disrespectful or lying or doing something that he's not supposed to be doing. But these days, in the modern era of this new millennium, the 26th year of this new millennium, being gentle is supposed to be a feature, not a bug. For some of us, that's a very hard feature to develop. It's not hard to do, but to develop into a habit so that you don't have to think about it like tying your shoes or what hand are you gonna write with, you don't think about those things, you just do 'em!
Being gentle. When I think about it even more, it ties directly into compassion. One of the things that I'm noticing lately with the state of the world as it is, there is a lot of compassion missing from the United States of America. I mean, we're in the midst of a second Trump term. He has in one year successfully incarcerated over 75,000 people that are supposed to be illegal, but we have no proof because they never show you any proof. All the allies in NATO don't know what to think about us because he doesn't think NATO is really necessary, and he's got his ICE agents running all over the country. If you look like you are not supposed to be here in this country, they'll pick you up just on your looks, and yes, the Supreme Court said it was legal for them to do that. They never show you any proof you're supposed to be picked up. Oh, and I almost forgot, I remember before the voting started, all he could talk about was how he was gonna lower costs on day one, everybody was bitching about Biden and the economy was bad and everything is really expensive and old Dork Boy is like, well, vote for me, I'll drop all those prices on you'll see, day one! We're gonna drop, we're gonna make life more affordable Groceries was his big word. He was fascinated that he actually could say the word groceries and he was telling everyone everywhere, groceries, “I'm gonna lower the price of groceries on day one, on day one! I'm gonna do it on day one!!” Yeah, we're a year and two weeks into the term and he hasn't done a bloody thing about the cost of groceries. He's done a lot of other things. Like made around $1.7 billion for him personally, but that doesn't affect you and me now does it? His family's made billions, maybe even more with crypto investments, but that doesn't help you or me now does it? So I'm not really sure what to say when you were told one thing and the person who told you that is doing another. Yeah. Things like that make me angry. I don't like them. In fact, I hate them, liars. I cannot live anywhere near liars. It just doesn't work for me. Now people are starting to figure out that they've been lied to for a long time. Not like I didn't try to tell you. So if you're one of those people who's come to the conclusion that what we're going through now in these United States was not what you voted for, you might feel some sort of way about that. You might even get on your own case about that. You might, hmm, I don't know. You might be in a state of denial and blame everybody else other than the people who are in power, but it's the people in power who are doing everything. 'cause when you don't have any power in this kind of governmental system, you really can't do anything. So when you're going over the tail of the tape and you're seeing where we're at, and you're trying to gauge, how did we get here? And then you see your contribution, you may, you may wanna have a talk with yourself and say something to the effect of, “Well, damn, how could I be so stupid?”
It's not your fault. You have a lot of company. On the other side of the ledger, there's a whole bunch of people who didn't vote. They're probably saying the same thing, that they didn't want the lesser of two evils, and they didn't wanna just vote for who was picked because it was rigged to that they picked that person to vote and go up against him and there's all kinds of excuses, but people made their choices and here we are.
So how do you feel about where we are? How are you doing? Are you like me and you've been unemployed because you've been in tech and over the last three or four years, tech has just been hemorrhaging jobs? You're probably not like me, you're probably not 64 years old and very, very, very, very, very concerned about how long you have to live on this planet and whether you'll be able to earn enough money to keep what you have. Or maybe maybe you just got outta college, maybe even a couple years ago, and you can't find a good enough paying job to support this family that you just started or even to support yourself, and you really don't wanna move back in with your parents’, again.
So what are you gonna do? Well, I have a suggestion of what you're not gonna do. What you're not gonna do is start getting all over your own case about that. Depression is a very, very weird little thing, and it sneaks up on people sometimes. All of a sudden, before you know it, you're bad mouthing yourself because you made choices and those choices led to conclusions and some of those conclusions put you where you are right now and you might feel ‘some sort of way’ about that. And what I'm trying to tell you is to beat yourself up over decisions that you've already made is kind of useless, and I only say kind of, it's useless in the sense that it won't help you feel any better, but what it might do is illuminate a better idea.
I'm known for saying, “Isn't it funny that your car keys are always in the last place you look?”
It is where you'll always find them, in the last place you look, but how do you know which is the last place? Well, obviously, because that's where the keys are. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But before then, maybe they're here, maybe they're there, maybe they're over there. That may be part is what I call becoming.
All of us are in this state of becoming whatever it is we're going to be in a given day, given hour, given minute. We're always becoming something. Because time, life, always moves forward. When you get into the habit of self-deprecation or self-insulting or thinking ‘some sort of way’ about yourself, time still moves, but you don't move with it because you're pulled back to the past. You're pulled back to what ‘has’ happened, and that takes you out of being ready for what's ‘going’ to happen. Something's always gonna happen. It may not be serious, it may be just temporary, very minor, you don't know, but if it's going to happen, that means it's in the future and you're supposed to be ready for it! You're supposed to quote unquote, plan for it!! That's one way of looking at it, I guess. I've tried it. I just get a little worried. What if I'm wrong? What if I make a choice that leads to somebody else getting hurt? What if I didn't have all the information and I try to make a decision and that leads to bad outcomes for me or someone else? Well, you'd have to go in the past and evaluate what happened, and then figure out what you can do and make some choices and try to come back, right?
But when I say becoming, what does that mean? What are we becoming? The answer is…better. Better at what? Everything. What do you mean? I mean that in those little gaps between decisions that you make, you are becoming more of whoever you are. I can only speak for me, but you know, as soon as I wake up and take inventory, which is all five senses work, okay, I've got a shot, I've got a possibility. The possibilities are starting right now. After that, it becomes decision time. What am I gonna do? Do I wanna do this, that, or the other thing? Well, that is me becoming involved in my day after I do all those things, and now I'm at breakfast and it's like, okay, I've, I've got four or five tasks I wanna get done. Well, then I'm becoming humming ready for those tasks. Now that I've done those tasks and I have practiced to do, or I have a song to work on, or I have a podcast to record, well then I'm becoming more complete in my day and when I have everything done and I go through my nightly routine of taking my medication and offloading my contact lenses and brushing my teeth while I'm becoming ready for the state of rest.
You see, if you keep looking at what's going to happen, you are going to have to choose things that help you become ready for whatever comes at you. And I'm not trying to say predicting the future, nobody can do that as much as you think you can, sorry. Sometimes it feels like it, but that's just a perception thing,
whole nother topic! But as we go through each breath of our life, we are engaging with and becoming something, we're engaging with something in our lives. Other people, places, things, situations, who knows? But when you step to the side a little bit and you start watching everything going by based on what you just did and what you're looking forward to doing in that space, you're becoming.
You're becoming better at getting home from work. Maybe you're becoming better at cooking a dinner. Maybe you're better at helping your kid with their homework. Maybe you're becoming better at solving challenges at your job. Maybe you're becoming a bigger part of your community and solving other people's problems, maybe you're becoming just a better you and you feel better about yourself. It all depends, but in that space between what ‘has’ happened and what's ‘going’ to happen is becoming.
We are always becoming something. Think about it this way, and I'll leave you with this. Think about it as, we all know that caterpillars come out and you know, they make a cocoon and then they hibernate in the cocoon and come out either a moth or a butterfly or something, unlike what they went in as and while they're in the cocoon, they are becoming who or what they're supposed to be. Now, they don't have the power of reason that us humans do, so for them, the process is pretty well laid out and they don't really have to do anything, it's instinctual. They just do it. But us being somewhere near the top of the food chain and having conscience and constructs of time and responsibilities and feelings, and all these other assets that set us apart from all the other creatures on the planet, it's not so easy becoming, because you're always not sure, even when you're sure there's that chance that you could mess it up and you know that you take it into account. But you make the choice anyway and then the consequence of that choice happens, and either it's good or it's bad, or somewhere in between and you do it all over again. But over the course of whatever period of time you want to choose, when you look at it from a high level as part of your day, or part of wherever you're at, it is your process of becoming whatever it is you want to be.
May we all become the best version of ourselves. In order to do that, we definitely, most definitely have to learn how to be more self-compassionate. We're only human, which means we don't always get it right.
Take good care of yourselves. Be easy on yourselves, and good luck becoming the next thing.
I am out.