Wanzology

Stepping Stones

 Rawr! Rawr! Rawr! Rawr! Hi! Welcome! Welcome to another edition of WANZ-OLO-GY, I am your host, The Wanz. I hope you are doing well and those that you care about are doing well. I apologize. My voice is a little tired, so if it sounds kind of different, that's why. I've been doing a lot of stuff with the throat, with the vocal, with the thing over the last couple of days. So I’m a little tired, but I cannot stop. I will not stop giving you your WANZOLOGY fix. Yeah. So, uh, today from #THEBOOKOFWANZ, the chapter goes:
WHO KNOWS WHAT STEPPING STONES LOOK LIKE UNTIL WE STEP ON THAT FIRST STONE.

Being that none of us are future tellers, at least not with any accuracy. I took the time to look at a progression of events and the outcome. Recently, I met a guy who admired my shoes. We talked for a few minutes. I found out he was in the music business. After a short time, he asked me to meet a producer he had thought I'd like and suggested that we work with this guy. A week later, I was in LA and in the studio with this producer.

During a break, I told him about the very first band I was in, called Central Connection, back in my college days. As I explained to him the makeup of the band, he stopped me and asked if I knew a certain person. The person happened to be the very guy who had asked me to join the band. And here, this guy, 35 plus years later, in a completely different city, knows him.

When I think of all the bands that I've been in, and all the people I've met, I am reminded of a staircase. Up or down, you can only take so many steps at a time, or you'll fall. Life is a series of big and small steps. Some are quite huge, like moving to a new city, starting or losing a job, or relationship. Maybe starting a family or something. Others are small, such as having a salad instead of a burger. Calling one friend as opposed to another. Each thing is a step. Every step in life is connected to another step. Funny how most steps lead us exactly where we want to go. But what about a place we've never been? This is where life either gets kind of scary or kind of exciting, depending on your perspective. Being aware that your next step could lead you down a new path, bad or good, can be sort of intimidating. I know that for a time, I didn't want to take any stress anywhere for fear of going down the wrong path. Being in fear all the time is a pretty ineffective way to live. But, back to the staircase.

I thought that up or down, there are only so many steps I could take in order to get to the top or the bottom. What if every choice I made was a step in a staircase? What if each choice led me down a path of stepping stones? To me, an effective life is one made of many experiences. In order to experience things, a person must be aware of where they are, what they are doing, and what choice is next. Once a choice is made, action is required, such as taking a step on a stepping stone or a staircase. There's never a guarantee that the next step isn't going to break you. Or that you won't lose your balance or change direction. Life has no guarantees other than you get to be a part of it and you get a choice in how you accept the consequences of your actions. What have you got to lose? If you've paid attention, considered your options, and made a decision, go ahead. Go ahead and put your foot on that next stone.

None of us gets from here to there without making some kind of decision. And each decision is, or can be thought of, as a stepping stone. So, let's make this really simple. You wake up in the morning and you have to go to the bathroom. Now, depending on how long you've been up, you might take a little bit of time and do a couple of other things before you actually go and relieve yourself. Those are all choices, and that's a path that you chose to walk based on those choices. You see what I mean? If you take it out in the real world, it can be a little more complicated, or it can be just as simple. You get to work. You settle into wherever your workspace is. What are you going to do for the day? Well, what did you not finish yesterday? Are you going to pick up where you left off? Are you going to start something new? Maybe somebody has come by your desk and randomized you and you're, you're going to go help them, either way. All of this will take up time and get you through the day. Stepping stones, hours, minutes, seconds are all stepping stones.

The trick is. If you're paying attention, you kind of have a general idea, intuition maybe, which stones you want to take, where you want to put your feet, what path you want to take to get you through your day. And this is where personal responsibility and all the consequences of your choices expose themselves.
Each one of them is a stepping stone that gets you through your day. Now let's do some addition seven days a week, every single day. You've made stepping stones every single day of the week. There are a certain amount of weeks in a month and a certain amount of months in a year. So conceivably you could go back over all the steps that you made in the last year.

It's not a perfect thing, but the path that got you to where you are today is a path that you started with. I don't know, some time ago. And you wound up where you are. I mean, I got up this morning, and had to go to sing a couple of hours at the airport, which is one of the reasons my voice sounds so weird. And you know what? I got done with that, got gas in my car, and then came home, was gonna have some food, but I thought, instead of just schlepping all my gear up the stairs to my place, I’d take the elevator, so I press the button, the door opens. I come in and press the floor that I'm going to and put the stuff down, and I notice the elevator's not moving. I look up no light to tell me what floor I'm on. I look down. None of the lights on the little panel where the buttons are are lit. Uh oh. So of course. I start pushing buttons, jumped up and down in the elevator a couple of times. I don't know, it just seemed like a thing to do. Then I started really thinking about all those stories about people getting trapped in elevators. And I calmly put all my stuff down that I had been schleppin and took out my phone, and decided, who was I gonna call first? Someone in the complex, where I live, to let them know that I was stuck in the elevator? Or, was I gonna call the fire department? I decided to call the fire department, because I had to go to the bathroom.

And I didn't want to stay in the elevator any longer than I had to. So, about 20 minutes, I hear a knock, knock, knock. “Hello?” I say, “hello?” “Anybody in there?” And I rang the alarm bell so that they knew somebody was in there. And I waited as I heard some knocking around and I could hear voices. And all of a sudden, the door to the elevator started to open. It had stopped about 8 inches short of my floor for some reason. And they're asking, well, what happened? It's an elevator, kind of like, ‘wait a minute, how do you, how do you put your seatbelt on, on a plane?’ Hasn't changed in years. You get in, you push the button, and it goes, right? Elevator. Nope! Not this time. This time, I didn't anticipate that the elevator would not work. The fire department folks that I was telling this to, they also seemed quite surprised that the elevator didn't work. It didn't do what it was supposed to do. So they did some troubleshooting and kind of got it back online. All I know is that I got out and took my stuff into my place, went to the bathroom.
So I was happy when I came out and it's like, do you guys need any information from me? And they're like, Nope, nope I think we're done here. Well, I thanked them and sent them on their way. And then I contacted the people in the complex that I'd reached out to, to let them know that I was no longer trapped. And then I posted to social media, letting them know that I had been trapped, but it was over.
And then I thought about when I first got back and parked my car, got all my stuff out, everything kind of went differently when I decided to take the elevator rather than what I usually do, which is schlep all my gear up the stairs.

What did I learn? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Cause you might end up stuck in an elevator. And, you know, I can laugh about it now because, I mean, it really wasn't that serious. It wasn't that big a deal. But, would I have gotten stuck in the elevator if I would have just did what I normally do, which is schlep my gear up the stairs? Probably not, more than likely not. So, there is a very, very, very vivid example of a choice taking you on a different path.

You do it all the time. It's probably not as dramatic as getting stuck in an elevator, but I'm pretty sure that there are times when it's like, Um, I think I'm gonna zag rather than zig, and then you have to make another decision because that zig put you in a place that you didn't expect to be, and then another decision, and then for all you know you get back to where you could have zagged, and you decide to zig, and then zag, and everything works out fine. It's just weird how that works. When you get to a certain point where you can like contemplate all the zigging and zagging, turn around, and every single decision that you made is like a stepping stone, one leading to the other to get you from then to now. So the question becomes what decisions are you going to make to get you from now to then whatever or wherever then is? Be careful, pay attention, gather information, and then make the best decision you can. Just make sure that after the decision is done, you will stand by the results of that decision. Because who knows what stepping stones look like until we step on the first stone. It's a very good question.

Hopefully the next step that you take is one that leads you in a direction that you want to go. You intended to go instead of someplace else that you had no intention of being. So with that, I'm really glad that you came to another episode of WANZOLOGY and I will see you next week. Okay? And hopefully my voice will be better.

I really think it will. Take good care of yourself and I'll see you next week.

Bye bye.