Wanzology

Acceptance
 Um, well, Halloween is over and now it's time FOR four days till Christmas, right? Yes, it just is all downhill from here. And I guarantee you within the next week and a half, there will be at least five commercials that you cannot stand. What's going on? This is The Wanz and you are tuned in to another episode of WANZOLOGY]!!!

Uh, I hope, I hope, I hope y'all is doing good. I am kind of in between. I've had to deal with some very menacing things, and they're not sorted yet, so I just have to wait. Which brings me to the topic of this wonderful podcast. The topic this week is the thing that we have the hardest time as humans dealing with ACCEPTANCE.
The serenity prayer goes: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

It's that last line that I take issue with the wisdom to know the difference. Now, let me tell you something about acceptance, when I was just getting sober, I was told to read this one page out of, uh, the big book, the big blue book of AA and it's on acceptance and I'm not going to quote that, but for me, it, it really was confusing, and it was like that for years. And then I heard the speaker, um, who totally crystallized everything for me. He basically said, you know, once something has happened, you can't change it. The best you can hope for is to understand how best YOU can accept what has happened.

So, if it's raining and you don't have a coat, you go outside, and you get wet, you have to accept that you're wet. If you see your significant other lip locked with someone else, you have to accept ‘something’. May not be what you think, may be everything that you're afraid of, either way, nothing you can do about it. I've, I've said for years, if it's on the outside of your skin, good luck. There's not really much you can do about it, you don't have any control over that. Thinking that you have control is like trying to hold a puff of smoke. It just can't be done. You have many ways to reason with yourself and find a place where you, you can be cool with whatever's happened.

Now, once something has happened, like rain, then you get all the power, you get all the power in the world and that power is, yes, choice. You get to decide what's going to happen next. What am I going to do? If you've already gone outside, you've already gotten wet, but if you are paying attention and you saw the weather report and you looked outside and sure enough, it's raining. Well, then you can choose to put on a raincoat, a hat, maybe even carry an umbrella and you go out and accept that it's raining. Like you really had a choice because it was already raining. You couldn't make it stop raining. If anyone knows how to like, take a stick, throw it up in the air and make it stay there. Hit me up. Let me know. I've been, I've been trying to find that one, find that solution for a long time.

Now, acceptance, when applied to our daily lives, is hard to see, very hard to see. I mean, it can be as something as simple as the milk is spoiled, you're out of coffee, no gas, don’t have exact change for the bus, your transit card is empty, flat tire, engine lights on, lost your phone, dropped it in the toilet. See where I'm going with this? And it's weird because the smallest things are the hardest to accept because they don't make any bloody sense sometimes. Case in point, I went out and grabbed a few things from the store, came home, couldn’t find my keys. This was like 30, 40 minutes later. Couldn't find them anywhere. Put away all the things that needed to be put away, relaxed for a little bit, came back, looked again, slowly, carefully, all around my place, no keys. I checked every piece of clothing in the dirty clothes hamper. I checked the washer and the dryer. I checked underneath every stick of furniture, no keys. And I said, okay, well, I can't find them, which means I've done an extraordinary job of hiding them from myself, because I do that sometimes, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to move on with my life because, I'll be doing something totally unrelated to what I'm trying to do and poof, they'll appear out of nowhere. That's what usually happens.
Okay. Four or five hours goes by, it's now dark. Where are my keys? Not, they didn't accidentally fall behind anything. They're not a, they didn't drop in a pair of shoes. Checked all the coats that are hanging on the coat rack. I wonder if I left them in the car. Well, I couldn't have left them in the car because when I came back out of the car, I had to use something to open the door and unlock the door. Okay, and by now it's like 10;30, 11 o'clock. I'm just ‘f-get-about-it’, I'll find them in the morning. So today comes along, where are my keys? I wonder, I wonder if I, I wonder, and I opened up the door and there they were sticking right in the lock. I couldn't remember what happened to them after I brought everything in yesterday.
So, in that little exercise, there was lots of acceptance. I had to accept that I couldn't remember where I put the keys. I had to accept that I couldn't find them. And then the hard part, I had to accept that I couldn't remember what happened to them and I knew, I knew, I knew, cause I know myself well, I knew that, you know, I was doing something and got distracted, put the keys down somewhere and went and did that something and then went onto something else, totally forgetting to pick up the keys and put them in the spot where they go, so know where they are. Yeah, 99 percent of all trouble in the world is caused by human error. Deal with it.
Acceptance is really hard because sometimes things just don't make sense. Why would I leave my keys in the door? I still don't know. I just know that I found them. As I tell people, you know, funny thing about losing your keys, funny thing about losing anything, it's always in the last place you look! Always. Don't know why. It's just one of those things, like Murphy's Law, you know what I mean? Acceptance. Nothing in the world will go right when you are fighting accepting what’s going on. There's a difference between accepting what's going on and disagreeing with what's going on. It's like I get in arguments all the time, or at least I did before the election. People are trying to tell me my opinions are crazy. They think my opinions are stupid. And knowing full well that I'm not stupid, I start asking them questions. One of the first questions I ask is, “So do you know the difference between news and commentary?”,
“What does that have to do with it?”,
“Really simple. If you're watching the news, it's telling you what's going on. If you're watching another type of program, they’re telling you what they think about and what you should think about what's going on.”
Because like I said, once something has happened, you only get the choice of HOW to deal with it. How are you going to accept it? You can't change that. It happened because it's happened. Whatever you had for breakfast today, if you had breakfast at all, sorry, can't go back and like get Fruit Loops instead of Pop Tarts. If you dropped your keys on the street and they went down the slats in the ventilation thing on the sidewalk. Yeah…what are you going to do now? You can't reverse time and make them not fall, so what are you going to do? Acceptance. It's, it's bloody, bloody hard. And it's not a matter of if, but how you accept something and herein lies the secret.

Once something has happened, you will always have a choice in how you're going to deal with what happened. What are you going to think about it? What are you going to say about it? What are you going to do? You're the one who gets to choose. Like I said, that's your superpower, choice. But therein lies the problem as well as the solution, because whatever choice you make might lead to something else that you'll have to accept and this is what will cook your noodle every time, before you make that choice, you don't know whether it's gonna be good or bad. Nobody tells the future, right? So is it gonna be good or bad? Am I going to make a good choice and then it makes it easier to accept whatever's happened? Or am I going to make a bad choice and it just perpetuates itself. Big ball of evil getting bigger and bigger like a pea rolling down a snow-covered hill. I'll tell you there is a secret to acceptance. It involves another question that I was asked a long time ago, what's the difference between a reaction or a response? What's the difference between a reaction and a response? The answer is: time. Time is the answer. Time is the difference between a reaction, which is, and a response, which is, uh, hold it. Okay.

Vegas nerve, baby. Vegas nerve in your body is built on reaction. It's limited. It only has like three or four things it can do, but they're all meant to protect you from whatever. And sometimes reacting is really good. Keeps you from getting hit by a car. Keeps you from dropping an egg on the floor and having it break. Who knows? Might keep you out of one of those conversations that you don't want to have.

Now a response gets past the reactionary nature of the vagus nerve. And that's when your thinking part of your brain engages trying to figure out, “Wait, what’s going on? Did I just see what I just saw? Did I just hear what I just heard? Did I feel what I just felt? And what do I think about these things?”, and you take a little time and then you take a little more time. You're not really sure, so you go back over it and then you take some more time. And before you know it, a whole two seconds has passed, and the smart thing is to go, “Huh…what happened?”, out loud!! You say it out loud because not only do you question yourself about what happened, if anyone's there, well, then they'll give you some kind of play by play of what they saw. Does it match with what you saw? Does it match with what you feel and what's the appropriate response? Don't know. And you think about it another five seconds goes by and you respond.

I'm leaving is your response, and you disappear. You leave. You could have stayed. You could have whipped out the ballpoint pen in your pocket and stabbed him in the eyeball, but you chose to leave. You could have told them that they were wrong and then spent the next amount of time convincing them that they're wrong, or you could just leave. Or maybe you could just punch him in the face, call him all kinds of curse words, or you could just leave. Mouth shut, feet engaged, walk away, which is always the safest thing. Because the saying goes, “Don't start none, won't be none.”, nobody really decides what the start is. One person starts, they always do, sometimes it's you, and you don't even realize it. Once something's started, you're in it, a nd then what?

Well, then comes acceptance. It's not what you see, folks. It's how you see it. It's not your perception, but your perspective that matters. How you see the world, how you see what happens in it. Have you ever like paid attention to that stuff? Have you ever like gotten out of your car at a parking lot somewhere, locked your door, and then just stood looking around for like 10, 15 seconds? Just look around, see everybody, everything else, just take it all in, kind of turn slowly in a circle, and you’ll start seeing the world differently when you do that. The difference will be, you'll be less reactive, because you see more, and I don't mean the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, not the plant, the character. What it means is, you'll be aware of many more things going on in your life. And if you're aware of things, it's a lot easier to prepare for things, which means you are less likely to react to things and more likely to respond to things.

You have all the power in the world, as long as it has something to do with most of the things going on inside of your own skin. Outside, all bets are off. All bets are off. But I'll tell ya, how do you know whether you're doing well at acceptance? You will recognize that something happens, and you don't really care. You don't really care. More times than not when you react, oh you care. You care a lot. “Why can't people pick up after themselves?”, “Why do they leave their turn signal on all the bloody time?”, “Why are you driving so damn slow?”, “How come you can't get good grades?”, “Why don't I get a raise, work my ass off!!”, all outside the skin, yo!! Outside! None of your damn business! The only thing that you really need to concern yourself with is what happens when that stimuli on the outside gets inside. Like I said, once something has happened, there's not much you can do about it except figure out the wisdom to know the difference between the things you can change and the things that you can't. Check it out, try it out, do a little mind experiment. Find a rock or a stick, throw it up in the air. If you make it stay there, you have the PO-WERRRRR!!
If it falls to the ground, gravity is more powerful than you.

Good luck in your discoveries and your experiments. Don't hurt nobody, okay?!?!?!

Acceptance. Remember the prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Keep coming back. It works. If you work it, mwahahaha!!! That's all I got, I will see y'all next week.
Take care.