Wanzology

Wanz:
[00:00:00] Doobie doobie doobie doobie do. Hey, how's it going? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY. I am your host, The Wanz. And, um, you know, I'm really happy to be here today. And I wanted to thank you for tuning in. Hope you're telling other people about the fabulous experience you're feeling with this podcast.

Yeah, um, I wrote a book about a million years ago after I got done touring and it was about all these tweets and things that I had accumulated while touring which themselves were interesting observations that I made with people I would talk to before shows so I'm gonna keep reading. This is the third chapter of hashtag the book of Wanz [00:01:00] Surviving life is good for a while when we survive we give ourselves a chance to live which gives us a chance to succeed.

I came across this question Am I living or just surviving? At the time, I was stuck in what looked to be a nowhere job, I was alone, and music wasn't a dream anymore. The reality was, I wasn't going to be a successful music star. The reality was, I wasn't gonna make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year testing software.

The reality was, I was exactly where I was. And that's where I was. Existing was just below easy. Not being

[00:02:00] very good at managing finances, I always seemed to be just one step behind on most of my bills. Though I looked good on paper, I wasn't very good at managing money. I was very impatient. I never learned those lessons my parents tried to teach me about saving up for what I want, investing time in what I cared about, and in the meantime, looking at and being happy with what I had.

Yes, instead, my eyes were on that person's car, or that person's house, or, oooohhh. Look at that father and son. They look so happy. I felt disconnected from my

[00:03:00] sons. Like they didn't want to share their lives with me. Because the oldest was partying a lot and the youngest lived with his mom, who I didn't get along with.

Money, job, relationships, all of them seemed unfulfilling. I was surviving each day as if I had been sentenced to life in prison. One night I came across a repeat showing of The Shawshank Redemption. I hadn't seen it for a while. So, I lay on the couch and watched it. For some reason, I paid particular attention to one line. "Hope. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies." I watched as the main characters each overcame their present circumstance and, in the end,

[00:04:00] were reunited on a beach in Mexico. To this day, I still tear up when I see the slow camera fade out from that beach as the movie ends.I had given up hope, and that was my problem, because I didn't see the end of the rainbow. I thought misery was my destiny, because I was caught up in extending my present circumstance. I wasn't moving forward. I had created my own version of the Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day, in the way I perceived my own life. In the old Kyle MacLaughlan movie, Dune, there's a line that goes, "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." My life was a thing, and I was

[00:05:00] destroying it by letting it slip away. I decided to look at each hour of my day as a separate piece, each slice of the pie its own separate episode, in a 24 hour program.

After a couple of days, I started to see patterns in how I thought about each day. I started to see that work had different challenges within different hours of the days. Some of these challenges I was successful at completing, some I wasn't. At the end of the day, I took inventory of the hours. I thought a little bit about how I'd gotten through from lunchtime to dinnertime, and from dinnertime to breakfast the next day. I then began to put 15 to 30 minutes of reflection into each period of the day.

[00:06:00] I started to notice I wasn't standing still in life. I was maybe going sideways a lot or working time in one place, but that one place wasn't spent doing nothing. I was reaching out to friends on social media. I was watching political shows or sending text messages to my sons to let them know I thought about them. Hell, I even worked on music in my studio. What I found was that my perception of what my life could be changed. Instead of looking at what I didn't have, I looked at what I had, and I became aware that others didn't have the little I did. I had friends and people, people who

[00:07:00] cared about me. Yes, even my sons told me that.

I had a job, an apartment, food in my cupboards. I had a cell phone, a car, I had people I could see and places I could go. When I started to share the perspective with friends who reminded me of that time and place, when I thought I had nothing, I found that they, too, maybe needed a shift in perception.

Some of them even emulated what I did, and their perspective changed, and then so did their lives, just as mine had. Get busy living? Or get busy dying. That's goddamn right. The Shawshank Redemption. Yeah, man. Every

[00:08:00] once in a while, I just get down in the mouth about how present circumstances feel cloudy day. Cloudy attitude. Sunny day. Sunny attitude. Or vice versa. Mixed results. It almost always depends on my perspective. I remember people saying, you know, I'm a half glass full kind of person. And I would say, hell, I'm, I'm, I'm just happy I have a glass. But I'll tell you something. How we think about ourselves at any given moment really, really affects what we do next, where we go next, how we show up when we get there. Think about it for a second. Not everything

[00:09:00] you do in a course of a day is hard. Not everything you do in the course of a day is easy. But if you can make it from, oh, I don't know, breakfast to lunch, and you haven't hurt you or hurt anybody else, you're doing pretty good, don't you think? Or how about, how about making it from like that nasty, that nasty time of day from like 2 PM to 6 PM. Oh my God, especially this time of year, you know, in autumn and winter when it's dark early. Yeah, nothing worse than looking outside, seeing that it's dark and then looking at your watch and going, Oh Christ, it's only quarter after five. But truly when you break your day up into pieces and then you look at each one of those pieces, life begins to take on a

[00:10:00] different tenor, one that you can move a little bit. I mean, remember, you have the power and the privilege to start your day over any damn time you feel like it. All you have to do is decide. Oh, no. There it is again. Choice. That superpower that everyone has and forgets how powerful it is. Yessiree, Bob. I'm telling you. We as humans are blessed and cursed at the same time. We look at things through our own prism. And think that our way is the way that everybody does things. Little did we know everybody's doing the same thing we are, just a little different. You know,

[00:11:00] look in traffic, people in cars, they might be listening to something in their car. They might not. If they have a passenger, they might be having a conversation. They might not. Everybody's doing something the same time you are, and they're doing it differently. Tell you what. Next time you go shopping, you go into a store, just pick somebody. Pick somebody and just watch them. Watch them for like a minute or two. Watch how they look around at things. Touch things, or not touch things. Watch if they're alone or with somebody, and how they behave in each case. Now think about how you behave. I'm not saying compare, comparing is kind of bad. I am saying, look at what they do. Look at what you do.

[00:12:00] How different are you from them? Oh, you're probably saying, I'm totally different. I do not look like, I do not look like that 80 year old woman. I don't look like that 20 something girl smacking on her gum. Talking to her friend. Don't get caught up in looks. Look for the similarities. I mean, you're both in that same store for a reason, right? Maybe you're shopping for someone who's the same age or the same relation, or you just never know. So perspective is a, is, is a huge thing. It's a huge thing, and sometimes when we get down in the mouth about how right now is going, we have a tendency to

[00:13:00] forget where we came from, which almost always detrimental, to where we're going and how we're going to get there. Like the theme song says, keep putting faith in front and believe the best is yet to come. You'll see nothing in this life comes completely free, but every once in a while, every once in a while, you just get lucky. Perspective. It's a thing. And just because right now sucks. It didn't suck a week ago. I mean, whatever day of the week it is. It's not like. A week ago, and it sure as hell is not gonna be like next week, on this same day. So, remember, surviving life is good for a

[00:14:00] while. When we survive, we give ourselves a chance to live, which, gives us a chance to succeed. So sometimes, it may feel crappy, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is, because you're still here. And, as long as you're here, you got a shot. You got a shot. So, make the best of it, I say. Why not? Why not? Cool, man. That's it. That's all I got for this episode of WANZOLOGY. I have been your host, The Wanz. Alright, I'll catch you later.

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