Wanzology

While You’re Waiting For Someone To Help You…

  Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello and welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!!

How you doing? You good? Yeah, man, another Wednesday, and here we are. I hope your summer's going really well. August in Seattle is always questionable. Usually the weather’s really good, but we've gotten into this partly cloudy, not really sunny, sort of warm, but not really cold pattern, which is nice because I mean, you know, three weeks ago it was 90 degrees and nobody here likes that crap but here we are in the immortal words of Buckaroo Bonsai, “No matter where you go. There you are.” Today is another chapter from the wonderful #THEBOOKOFWANZ book available on Amazon and it goes a little something like this: WHILE YOU'RE WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO HELP YOU REMEMBER, YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE TRYING TO WORK IT OUT YOURSELF.

Ever been around someone who's always asking a question? “What time is it?”, “Who was that band you were listening to?”, “What's the atomic weight of helium?”, and the best one, “Why did I do that?”. I think it's funny that for all the learning we do, we never use most of our deductive powers. We are content to let someone else do our thinking for us. I realized that no one knows everything, but what if they did? Could you imagine how many questions would come their way? How many people would line up to have something figured out? The person that knows a lot would either be filthy rich or blow their brains out!

You are a thinking human being. As a baby, you learn how to solve challenges. When we are infants, we want to be fed, we figure out how to communicate our needs the only way we know how. As our know-how progresses and we learn better communication skills, I think some of us lose that innate deductive ability. Some of us would rather have someone else figure stuff out for us. Why is that? Why do we not challenge ourselves more? Shouldn't we? You're smart. You know, some things! I’m not saying you're going to find the world's ultimate renewable energy source, but you could. If you ask a friend to give you a ride to the mall, you have to wait to see what their answer will be and if they say yes, you have to wait for them to show up. You're always gonna to be waiting for something, so what's to do while you wait? Answer? Figure out another solution yourself.

Life is about trying things out and imagining how something might work. As much as it is about waiting to see how it actually does work. While you're waiting for an answer to your question, you could be figuring out how to not have to ask another person who may have a different solution. As much energy as it takes to think into the future and figure out where you're going next. It takes some amount of energy to think about another way of answering the question. Help may not always be on the way, so while you're waiting, see what you can figure out on your own.

Working out your own problems is part of the responsibility of being a fully functioning human being. You owe it to yourself to try different approaches, techniques, and styles to find out what fits you and to answer your own questions. One of the most annoying things to me used to be, “Hey, Wanz, what time is it?” and back in the day before there were cell phones, I couldn't understand why someone couldn't figure that out on their own. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mean, you know, not being able to tell time. I mean, asking me because you see that I wear a watch, choosing not to wear a watch yourself. I'm speaking about that person, not you that I'm speaking to. I really needed to know if someone needed to know what time it was. Have you looked to see if there's a clock on the wall? Have you looked to see if there's a clock on a desk? Have you looked around to see if there's a clock? Oh, that's right, the first thing that you saw was the wristwatch I usually wear. So you're gonna ask me. I get it. One time is fine. Two times, still fine. Three to five times, like in a short period of time, that’s annoying. That's totally annoying.

Now, in the age of cell phones, it's really annoying when somebody says, “Hey, what time is it?”, “I don't know. What time do you think it is? Five or 10 minutes after the last time you asked me or is it 10 minutes before the next time you're going to ask me?”, “I don’t know, man!”, usually that's where I actually ask, too, when I get tired of answering that question. “I don’t know, man, uh, might be I don't know, daytime?” Daytime's always good, because you can see that. Now, there are other questions that take a little bit more, hmm, how you say, depth of reasoning, “Why does this always keep happening to me?” My pops used to say, “Those lessons not learned in life will be repeated.”, so if you find yourself always seemingly coming back to the same thing, the same situation, having to make the same decision, you may be caught in what I call a loop.

A loop is where the mundane becomes so ingrained, the boredom becomes so prevalent, that all you do is the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. Which as we all know, if you're expecting a different result from doing the same thing, you're probably pushing the boundaries of insanity, and I don't want that for anybody. For the longest time, I could not understand why I could not just remember the simplest things. I still have this challenge. I've tried, uh, communication techniques that help you remember names and places and numbers. I've tried reading books on how the brain works and how recall works. I've tried writing myself notes, leaving notes on my phone and a variety of other things. Yet I always seem to find myself back at this little spot where I really want to remember something or someone, and I can't. It's annoying.

Another example is it seems that over the course of my life, no matter how hard I try to avoid hurting somebody in a relationship, I always end up hurting somebody in a relationship. I've been doing therapy for a while and I'm the guy who likes to find his own solutions. I like to find the solution to a problem. I really hate to be the one that causes a problem. What has come to light is my conclusion is life is completely and totally circumstantial. Depending on what circumstance you're in will determine what solution works out best.

Now applying this to the, ‘I'm always stepping on somebody's toes or hurting them in some way, shape or form’, what I've determined is I'm working on being more patient. I'm working on waiting before I say anything or do anything, especially do anything. I'm trying to wait to see what possible solution I could find myself and sometimes I'm right. Sometimes I'm wrong. I try to learn when I'm wrong, apologize, try to make it up to someone if I've hurt them and then move on, which is not always that easy. Simple, but just not always that easy.

Now, I don't say this as a person who has all the answers, I keep trying different answers, hoping that in whatever specific circumstance I'm in, I don't repeat what I have done before. I mean, let's see, how do we put this? What's something repetitive? Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Something silly like flossing. If your gums keep bleeding when you floss, maybe it's the way that you floss and not the floss itself. So you try to do it a different way. Maybe using a flosser would be better. Maybe it would be better using a certain type of flosser rather than the one that you've already been using. I don't know. What I do know is that while you're waiting around for someone else to answer, or to help you find an answer, you still have the ability to explore possible answers yourself.
And being a self-reliant, independent human being, I think, is everyone's goal, isn’t it? I know it's mine. Maybe it's not yours, and I mean, that's cool, that's cool. But, you know, we spent most of our lives under the thumb and tutelage of a parent or two and then we went out in the world and tried to learn a thing or three. Only to find ourselves asking another person who has gone through pretty much the same experience the answer to a question you could have figured out yourself. I just don't think that makes any sense.

One of the reasons my kids love me is because if they have a question, I have an answer. I grew up with parents who were okay saying, “I don't know.”, which I used to hate because I wanted to find out the answer. So, I stopped asking them because they weren't going to answer my question anyway. And I went and found my own answers. But as I got older, I realized that there's great power in saying, “I don't know.”. Saying “I don't know” opens up a door and that door leads you to a solution to the question. It leads you to an answer. So now we have this see-saw thing, right? How do you try to find out answers on your own, yet still be humble enough to not think you already know the answer and ask someone? Dynamite question, isn’t it? How do you leave the door open so that you can learn something you don't know, while at the same time, come up with your own answer? Because you know, being human is not a ‘zero-sum’ game. It's not ‘either/or’. Life is a whole buttload, buttload of ‘maybe’.

Is it going to rain today? Maybe. Are they going to text me back? Maybe. Am I going to get this job or am I going to get fired? Maybe. You don't know. So while you're waiting for the answer, what do you think? Thinking is free. It's not regulated. It's not controlled by anybody but you. And, you know, I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to come off as Mr. Condescending or anything, but sometimes it amazes me how little credit people give themselves for their own thinking. You know things. You wouldn't have made it this far if you didn't know some things, right? I mean, there's a lot of stupid people out here, and when I say stupid, stupid to me, the definition of stupid is knowing the correct answer, yet choosing to do something else.

Knowing the correct answer is the key, right? How do you not burn your hand on a stove? Well, you don't put it on the stove when it's hot. That kind of stupid, mind-numbing logic, that's what I'm talking about. Yes, some things are more difficult than others to figure out on the fly, I get that, but for the most part, you, as a fully functioning human being, know things. You figured them out for yourselves.

You figured out how to stay upright on a bicycle, didn't you? You figured out how to not drown when you went swimming, didn't you? You figured out how to get from the top of the mountain all the way down to the lodge on two boards strapped to your feet, or one strapped to your feet. You've figured out how to navigate from point A to point B in a vehicle, using all four limbs, going through a series of turns, speeds, while not hitting anything or anyone else. So, you're capable, obviously, right? What have you got to lose? “Oh, I might look stupid.”, “I might say the wrong thing.”, yep, you might. Welcome to the world, ‘human’.

Conversely, on the other side, that person who is asking, why haven't you asked them a reasoning question? Like, “Hey Wanz, what time is it?”, “Um, I don't know, what time do you think it is?”, “How do you get to the Space Needle?”, “Um, not sure. How do you think you could get to the Space Needle, where is it?”, or you’re gonna love this one “What's for dinner?”, “Uh, what would you like for dinner?”, “Let's go to the movies.” “What movie would you like to see?”, “Let's go on a road trip.”, “Where would you like to go?” Once again, it's circumstantial. When to ask, and when to just answer, or when to say, “I don't know”. All I'm trying to get at is the simple premise of the chapter in #THEBOOKOFWANZ, WHILE YOU'RE WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO HELP YOU, REMEMBER, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE TRYING TO WORK IT OUT YOURSELF.

As a fully functioning human being, you are more capable than you probably give yourself credit for, so when you have a question, hold back and don't ask somebody think of an answer, then see if it's right. I mean, I do that stuff all the time.

“If I'm right about this, I'm gonna make sure to have an ice cream when I get home.”, “If this person goes and does this or says that, I'm gonna make sure to, like put goldfish on my salad”, some little reward. And I don't need to tell anybody. I don't share all that stuff with everybody, it's personal. And that way, if I'm wrong, well, I'm wrong. The only person I have to admit it to is myself, but as long as you have that little voice inside your head thinking all the time and saying all those things. Put it to good use. Have the conversation inside to figure out the possibilities, the possible answers to your questions. Because everybody's going to have them, that's, that's not the sin, a question never killed anybody. Sometimes the answer did. Deductive reasoning is just that, deductive. It means you have to go through a sort of step-by-step process. And if you're not sure about that, go back and Google the character Spock.

I grew up on Spock. I love Spock. Spock was my key to deductive reasoning. Things had to be logical. Logical is either, it is or it isn't, right? Some of those things can be applied to human behavior, but most of them only add to more questions. And it's funny, the longer you start deducing, the less you ask. Now doesn't that seem like a conundrum? If you want to know something, ask,
but if you spend a lot of time deducing, you don't need to. It's up to you. Everybody does it different and I'm not saying that I have all the answers, but I am saying, while you're waiting, do something. Don't just depend on somebody else, you're a fully functioning human being and you can do things. As if you're listening to this, you got this far, and I, for one totally believe you can go farther. This is just another way of doing it.

And I'll leave you with this. When I was first getting sober, I had no idea how to not drink. Because drinking was like breathing for me. I used to love to drink. I drank all the time but when it came time for me to not drink, I had no bloody idea of how to do it. None. It was suggested that I hang out with people who had more experience not drinking. So, I tried it, and I watched, and I listened, and I learned. I learned a variety of ways not to drink. It's not as simple as it may seem, but that's what separates alcoholics from ‘normies’.

‘Normies’ don't think about how many drinks they had. ‘Normies’ don't think about when they're going to get their next drink. ‘Normies’ don't obsess over getting their next drink. The best piece of advice that I got from those people who were teaching me how to not drink, if a situation feels familiar, try to remember what you did the last time and do something different. The goal is to find a different experience with a similar situation. If it feels familiar, do something different that is unfamiliar and uncomfortable, because that's the only way you're going to have a new experience with a familiar situation. Do something different. Act differently. Think differently. You've done it before, I'm pretty sure you're gonna figure this out on your own. But I want to leave you with that little challenge. If something feels familiar, like you've done it a million times, what happens if you change it just a little bit? Does it still feel the same? Do you feel awkward? Do you feel clumsy? Do you feel inadequate? I'll let you come to your own conclusions on that one. It's a very interesting thing, this being human. Knowing when to ask and when to think and when not to ask and when not to think; it's bloody complicated.

My dad loved that song “The Gambler”, used to tell it to me all the time,

Son,
“You gotta know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em.
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money while you're sitting at the table.
There'll be time enough for counting when the dealin's done.”

Knowing when to hold’em, knowing when to fold’em. Good luck with that!

So, there's a few more chapters left in your #THEBOOKOFWANZ, and pretty soon we'll be on the new things. Could be current events, could be psychological, could be motivational, could be common sense, could be relationships, a lot of things out there, a lot of things that I'm pretty sure I look at a certain way and other people don't look at it at all, but that's what WANZOLOGY is all about. I do things a certain way and I'm just trying to give you another way of doing what it is you already do. There's always another way to get to whatever solution you're seeking, it's not always one way. And that makes life interesting or else it just gets boring doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, because you think you already know the result. That's why we're doing this, people. That's why I'm doing this!!! And I hope it's helpful.

Thanks for putting up with me in the first place. I'll see you next Wednesday on WANZOLOGY!!!

Bye!!!