Latest / Wanzology / No, I Won't Back Down
Transcript
- No I Won’t Back Down Hi, welcome to another Wednesday, and if it's Wednesday, you know it is another episode of WANZOLOGY!! How you doing? You good? How your mama do, how your cousin? Okay, I know I'm a little silly, but I can't help it. I can't help but be a little silly because there is just so many things happening. Uh, I am afraid of a lot of things. One of the things that I am most afraid of is I won't be free. Free as in a free human being, as a, as in a citizen of these United States, uh, free. Why do I feel this way? You ask. Because right now, right now, the government is shut down and there doesn't seem to be any, I don't know, there doesn't seem to be any good solutions. There doesn't seem to be any kind of resolution to the conflict and when I say conflict, I mean the conflict between the warring factions of our government. It tends to leave a little guy, a little person, a common citizen, uh, feeling like they're left out in the cold and that's kind of what I feel like. I kind of feel like no matter what happens, there's always gonna be factions on both sides. The sides that support this person who occupies the White House and people who don't. Those of us who don't support him are reasoning is really simple, all the things that he's doing are un-American, period. He behaves as if he is a king and he's not. Now I don't know any other way to put it. Those are my personal thoughts on the matter, that's not what this episode is about. I've spent a little bit of time trying to get myself out of the funk that's generated by the current situation. It hit me a couple of days ago. It's just taken me a little while to get this down on digital audio for you. There is a song that totally encapsulates how I'm feeling about stuff and it's by Tom Petty and the song is called “I Won't Back Down”, and it goes a little something like this: Well, I won't back down No, I won't back down You could stand me up at the gates of hell, but I Won't back down No. I'll stand my ground Won't be turned around And I'll keep this world from dragging me down Gonna stand my ground And I won't back down For me, that's inspiration because. I haven't got a total grasp on everything that happens in my world, but I think my reactions are much better than they used to be and as has been told to me many times, it's about progress, not perfection. Human beings are never gonna be perfect. That being said, You could stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down I like that. What does that mean? That means determination. That means I have a set goal in my mind where I want to be and how I'm gonna get there and no matter what comes along to trip me up or hold me back, I'll still keep moving forward ‘I won't back down’. The song continues: Hey baby, there is no easy way out Hey, I will stand my ground and I Won't back down The next section goes: Well I know what's right I got just one life In a world that keeps on pushing me around But I'll stand my ground and I Won't back down. Do you feel like the world pushes you around? Do you feel like there are a lot of things that are happening in this world, your world, my world, the world that is unfair to you? I do. I think there's a lot of unfair things in this world, but that no one ever said that life was fair. You always wanted it to be fair, not realizing that fair is like two sides of a coin. Sometimes it's heads, sometimes it's tails. It doesn't matter which one you pick, you're not gonna be right every time. You're not always going to know what to do every time. You're not always going to say the right thing, give the right answer to a question. make the right decision every time. But it is in these moments when we are imperfect, when we are not successful, these are the moments, where we as human beings tend to shine. Why? I'll describe it this way. One weekend I was down at my folks' house helping out in the yard like I was known to do when they were around and mom had made some food. And so dad and I were sitting down and we're eating and mom joined us and we're hanging out and talking about everything and nothing at allnd got done eating and mom was clearing stuff from the table. And I helped. And then I came and sat down with dad and he looked at me. Uh, it was a curious look, not one that I'd seen in a while. He said, “You know what I admire the most about you?”, and inside I'm like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, What? What do you what? Hold up, hold up. Stop the press. Wait what?”! But I just looked at him and I said, “No, what is that? Pop?” He said, “No matter how many times you get knocked down, you always get back up. I really admire that about you, son.” And I said, “Thanks, pop! I love you!”, and he told me he loved me back. When people say that they are in the fight of their lives, do you understand what they mean? I do. Every single day, we humans try to make the best of the time that we have, and one way of moving forward is to not go backwards. Which is what I really like about this song: “Hey baby, there ain't no easy way out Hey, I will stand my ground And I won't back down No, I won't back down” That's the way I choose to live. I may not get it right all the time, I may not win the contest. It's weird. It's almost like lotto. It's like, why do you play? Nobody ever wins. Well, those who don't play never win, and this game. Of going to bed at night and getting up, and some of us go to work, some of us are getting our family ready for the kids to go to school, and all the stuff that takes us from the beginning of our day through the middle of our day to the end of our day. For all of us that's living in our lives, we are all doing exactly the same thing, we're doing the best we can, to be successful as much as we can. Now, if you're not being successful, if your goal is to just screw up everything, well then I'm not talking to you. But for the most part, nobody really wants to fail. Nobody wants to not know what they're doing. Nobody really wants to let others down who depend on them. Being successful is how we measure a lot of things. I had to, I retrained my brain to think about ‘what do I put in’, you know, the saying, garbage in, garbage out. So if you tell yourself nasty things, if you think less of yourself, the odds are you are going to do less than you're capable of. If you don't think you are attractive, odds are no one's gonna be attracted to you. If you think you are not smart or have experience in life, people won't ask your opinion about how to do or be your go somewhere. This is what really cooks my noodle, I never really understood it, even though it happens to me often. I don't know how, I forget how I got where I am. Where I am is not where I used to be and it's not where I'm going to be. Same with you. Where you are right now is not where you were yesterday, a month ago, three years ago, 10 years ago. All of us change and evolve as time passes. I used to have a psychiatrist who said, “How can you deny your possibilities when you have so much ‘evidence’ behind you?” I was like, “Wait, what? What? What are you talking about?” He said that, “At any given time, we are the sum of every single one of our experiences.” He got me to realize all the experiences that we have, fuel what we're going to be going through, not exactly what we're going through, but what's next. And it's the what's next part that you really have to be careful about, because nobody tells the future, nobody KNOWS what's gonna happen. As I say in my song, ‘Get Lucky’. “I can't say what's gonna happen I didn't come here to read your cards I'm not here to hand you a tissue Just because your damn life got hard But I will say that anything is possible If you have the strength to try. If you keep reaching, there's a good chance Someday you'll surely touch the sky Chances will keep coming Sure is the sunrise every day You can choose to sit and watch 'em pass Or grab what's yours to take!” It's that last part, “Grab what's yours to take!” Look at where you came from, how you got here, how you got through 12 years of school maybe, or how you got through that, and then four to eight years of college or 10 years on the job or the birth of your child to their graduation. You did that!! Nobody was substituting themselves for you, YOU did that! Today, I forgot that. I forgot how I got to where I am out of fear of what was coming or what is coming. There's no ‘was’ about what ‘is’ coming, if I'm staying in the present tense, yes, I'm concerned. I'm concerned about a lot of things. I don't really know what I'm going to have for lunch tomorrow, even though the weather's going to be sunny, it may not be nice and sunny. It could be a crappy dayven though the sun is out and the birds are chirping and whatever, that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm gonna have a good day. There's no guarantees that you’re going to have a good day, but if you have the opportunity to have a day, don't back down. Don't get turned around. Stand your ground. Even if you're at the gates of hell. 'cause you know what? “Hey baby, there ain't no easy way out”, and I know “I will stand my ground and I won't back down No, I won't back down” I suggest that maybe you take a listen to Tom Petty's “I Won't Back Down” from the 1989 record Full Moon Fever. Listen hard at the words. Listen to the way that he sings it. I use it as fuel to propel me to the next moment. You can do that. Remember, you didn't get here just by luck. You didn't get here just by chance. You had to do a lot of things to get from there, to here, and you have to go through what you're going through right now to get to whatever's next. Keep this in mind though. Keep this in mind. Everything is temporary. Everything that has a beginning, has an end, and it's temporary. I hope that you figure out your path forward. Me just putting this episode together has taken about 48 hours for me to figure out and to get to this chair and to talk into this microphone. Sometimes life is like that and I accept that. I just need to, uh, I need to decide on a better way of handling how I decide how I feel about what happens, and even if I do decide about how I feel, I can't let those feelings get in the way of action. Without action, nothing happens. Just like with breathing, breathing is an action. You're not breathing, you're not happening. It's pretty simple. Most things in life are very, very simple. Don't back down. Don't get turned around. Okay? I will if you will. Let's check in with each other next week and see how we do, take care.