Wanzology

The Beauty Of Gettin Old

 Bum ba dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee bum ba dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee bum ba dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee dum bum bum. Welcome to your Wednesday. It is another episode of WANZOLOGY! He he he ha ha ha ha ha. How are ya? I'm a little crazy today. Sorry. I just thought I'd warn ya. But that's the way things go. Uh, milestone, this is the last chapter of #THEBOOKOFWANZ .

Imagine my surprise when I was looking through the chapters and I found that there are like five duplicate chapters. This is like a microcosm of what my life is like. Keep in mind that I wrote this in 2015. It was proofread, not only by me, but by three other people who are publishers. Yet, there are at least five duplicate chapters in this book. Just finding that out. Ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah. Let it never be said that I don't find new and inventive ways to prove that I am human. Hopefully your discovery will come much, much sooner. With that being said, I want to remind you that you can always get your copy of #THEBOOKOFWANZ at Amazon. com duplicates and all. Why, why change it? It's not really broke, so there.

Alright. Uh, I'm sorry. I, I was distracted by, uh, I used to have, in fact, I still have this little, teeny weeny comic that I got out of, uh, the newspaper when I was in high school and I've kept it. It's an elephant sitting at a vanity table, right? Little teeny weeny makeup table with a heart shaped mirror and you can see the reflection of the elephant on it. Sitting in this chair, completely overwhelming the size of the mirror, and at the bottom, the caption says, “I must be worth the trouble I cause myself”. That, in and of itself, could be an episode, but it just came to mind because it has consistently, consistently repeated itself over the course of my existence. Since high school, all through college, I always seem to run into it, and man, it, it shifts my perspective. Want to get a taste? Go in the bathroom and look in the mirror. Look into your eyes and say it out loud, “I must be worth all the trouble I cause myself” and see how you feel after that. It's a thing to ponder.

On with the chapter then: THE BEAUTY OF GETTING OLDER IS RECOGNIZING THAT, AND HOW, WE'VE GROWN.

Getting old is one of the many things that every creature on this planet has in common. Every person, place, or thing that begins also, at some point, ends. My father used to say, “No one gets out of this alive”, and I believe him. The question usually asked, and in many different forms, is, “what now?”, or, “What's next for me?” What I learned is that contrary to what most of humanity tells us, we can choose our own path, travel at our own pace, and ignore it, if we like. Point being, we get to choose. The beauty of getting older is the knowledge that one accumulates as a result of these choices. Bad or good, we live in the consequences of our choices. What we eat, and when, and where, where we go, how we get there, and with whom. All choices we almost never really think about.

For example, when's the last time you thought about how to tie your shoe, or how to put on a shirt facing the right way, or what color or colors look good on us, or at least, that we think look good on us. What's for dinner? Left or right? Up or down? All these little choices lead to bigger choices, and always to a consequence. From these consequences comes knowledge in the form of experience. Good experiences one remembered, bad ones tend to be forgotten. Unless we feel that we need to hold on to some memory for future reference.

Whether we like it or not, knowledge is the root of the beauty of our lives. The more we know, the more we can do. What we can do when we get there and share these experiences is how we connect with other people. The deeper the connection, the better the relationship. As time passes, hopefully we see how our lives are better, or worse, compared to others with whom we share our experiences.

Every once in a while, look back to when you were in primary school. Do you notice the difference between who you were then and who you were in middle or junior high school? How about between high school and college? Or maybe just five years ago now? Once we recognize how far we've come, even if it's only a little ways, we see the beauty of getting older.

“Change, the only thing you can count on.” - Pop-Pop

Pop-Pop was what my dad's grandchildren came to know him as, and, uh, the older he got, I just started calling him Pop. You know, one of the truest things he ever said was, “Change is the only thing you can count on”, and you know, for a perfect example, look at the weather. Every single day, it's different. Sometimes subtle difference, sometimes huge difference. But every day, it's different. Similar sometimes, you get a stretch of four days in a row of rain and gray or showers or whatever. Or conversely, you get two days of sunshine with no clouds. There are those who always say, “I wish the sun would come out”, and I remind them, well, it is out, that's how we know it's daytime!

Words are funny things. They can mean the same thing, but when used in certain ways, it's hard, it's hard to discern what someone is trying to say. And some don't realize sometimes that the literal meaning of words is what other people hear. I am so guilty, so guilty, of thinking that you, there on the outside of my head, hear’s all the conversations that are going on inside my head. And sometimes when I'm trying to explain something, I'll skip a word or presume that you know what I'm talking about because I left out a word or a sentence or a phrase, I didn't even notice, but it's part of who I am. My brain moves about two light years faster than my mouth. My mouth has an editor. In my head, that is what I call ‘I’, and the two voices that are always bickering as ‘Me’ and ‘My-self’. In my head is ‘Me’, ‘My-self’, and ‘I’, and there are three voices that are always talking. Always. Used to drive me nuts, and the only way that I could like, silence one or all of them was to get loaded. I had no peace until I was drunk. Then it became a matter of the stimulus from outside, but I didn't have to worry about these three knuckleheads telling me things, constantly. But when I got sober, I realized how they work. Cause before I was just pissed off ‘that’ they worked, and when I figured out ‘how’ they worked, I kind of put them at their own little table.

‘Me’ is Mr. Exuberant, Mr. Excitement, wants to go everywhere, always has a song cooking! Always! Everything is a song! Everything is good! Everything is fast! Everything is, ‘dot, dot, dot’. ‘My-self’ is scared of everyone and everything. “I'm going to get hurt”. “I'm going to be ignored”, “Nobody likes me!”. Total negative, Nancy!!! That is ‘my-self’ (two words, my-self). ‘I’ is the spokesperson in the editor, controls the mouth, has to interpret what these other two knuckleheads are yapping about and have it come out somewhat in a coherent manner. So, the next time you're just like watching me, me, myself, and I is like running at the speed of sound or light or whatever, it's just fast. It's always happening. I can't not think, which is annoying when you're trying to meditate because there's always something for me to think about, hence, I over-think. Maybe you have that in common with me. Can't stop thinking? You think something into the ground?

I said it in an earlier episode, there's a lovely little analogy I love to press upon people. Put an egg on a table and ask someone, “what do you see?”, and after they say, “Well, it's an egg”, press them a little farther. “What do you see?” Some people will say, “Well, I could make an omelet”, some people would say, “I could put that in cake or cookies or something.”, some people might say, “Well, it's gonna be a chicken.”, but it's just an egg.

Now, that one little tidbit of my experience is my proof that not everybody sees everything the same way. Not everyone experiences the life they live the same way that you experience yours, and therein lies the rub. Time is always passing, can't stop it. You can just float on it, maybe, at best, and it's really best to think of it as, you know how rivers start, right? They start as little drips and little gurgles and streams and brooks high up in the mountains, and as they keep going downhill, they gain volume and size and sometimes, speed. That's what getting old is like. The river never stops. The river of time is always moving. I think it was like my third month of sobriety. I figured out, you know what, I have the power to just stop and stand in this river of time and look around, see what's going on, before I look down it a little farther. You know, we don't get a choice of being on this river, but we do get a choice of where we choose to stand in it.

Ferris Buehller's Day Off One of the best movies ever, one of’em. I have a crap ton of them, but this one comes to mind because of the mantra of that movie, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.”, you might miss it.

And in this last chapter, I say, look back a couple years. Jesus, you don't even have to look back years. You can look back an hour, 15 minutes, 15 seconds, at what you just went through. When you look over time, you can start to see the difference between who you were then and who you are now. Sometimes you can even see what you didn't know then and what you've learned. And sometimes, sometimes when you share that with someone else, there is similarity, and there is what life is all about. It's that similarity. Because, I mean, you know, we all go through whatever ‘it’ is. We all go through it. But I always wonder how come we don't share with each other how we went through it. Once you figure out that, “Oh, I went to Disneyland when I was a kid.”, “Really? What rides did you like?”, or something like, “Have you ever been in the Space Needle?”, “Yeah, I remember the old Space Needle, now it's new, it's got see through floors and everything.” All this came from learning. All of that.

Your experience is not unique. You may think it's unique, but what I learned when I was touring from these teenagers was that they all are going through similar experiences. But they're in different countries, different cities, different cultures, different languages, different upbringings. So many differences. Yet they're all going through the same thing. and what was really cooking my noodle is some of the things that they were going through when I would meet them before a concert, I would find that they were going through things that I, as a 51-year-old, was going through. They showed me a new perspective. I would share what I knew and my experience, which, most of it, they'd never heard of it before, kind of like, now. Maybe you've looked at your life like I'm describing. You take stock of where you are, looking at where you've been and that helps you decide where you're going, and I said it helps, it just doesn't always make the decision. You still have to choose. You have to make your own path. You can follow along behind someone who's had a similar path, and try to experience it the way they did, or not, or you can make your own path. But I think it's fascinating how little time we spend looking at how we process our position in our own lives.

It's very important. It's very important to always know where you are in a process. What's a process? Anything that has a beginning and an end is a process. Like brushing your teeth, tying your shoe, making an omelet, going to work, changing a diaper. So many processes happen in our lives, we just kind of ignore them. I think it's funny, but when you're participating in your own existence, when you are actually in tune with your ‘self’ (two words), you are noticing all these little things and how they connect to the big things. And when you do that, and the more often you do that, I hope that you have the same experience that I did. You learn about not only who you are, but how you came to be that way and why you are.

There used to be a formula in marketing and promotion. The five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. You ever tried applying those to a certain experience in your life? Who, what, when, where, and why? You should try it. It's very interesting that when you do it for one certain thing, repeatedly, the answers change. The result of the answers change. The feeling around the results of those answers changes. It's hilarious to me that more people don't take the time to look at their lives like this. Doesn't take very long. Jesus, what are you doing when you go to the bathroom? What are you thinking about? It's about how much time it needs. Doesn't matter if you're ‘one-in’ it or ‘two-in’ it. Two in it is probably better because it takes a little more time, but this is the perfect thing to think about. What happened five minutes before you came into the bathroom? What do you think is going to happen five minutes after and why? Who, what, when, where, and why? The lessons you will learn about yourself and others, to me, is the basis by which you expand your conscience.

It's an appropriate last chapter because it is true, not because I said so, but because it's been my experience. THE BEAUTY OF GETTING OLDER IS RECOGNIZING THAT AND HOW WE'VE GROWN.
Keep growing, keep looking, keep asking, and keep sharing. This is how we will all get through life together.

I really appreciate if you've been diligent about catching these episodes with the book, now I really have to get off the schneid and figure out what I'm going to do next. But I think what I'm going to try to do is have a WANZOLOGY. com website up and running and challenge people between Thursday and Saturday to write and give me some subject matter. Tell me a story. Share an email with me and it might become an episode of WANZOLOGY, because WANZOLOGY is just a way that I look at my life and the lives of others based on the similarities and not so much the differences between us.

Only one species of human being on the planet. I've said it so many times. And most of us don't realize how much power we have over ourselves. And hopefully there are new perspectives that we can learn from each other.

So with that, I encourage you, like I say at the end of every program, do something good for yourself, then go do ‘it’ for someone else.

Once you start looking at the results of these things, you might be surprised at what you learn. Thanks again for being a part of WANZOLOGY!!

I will, hopefully, see you next week. Buh bye!