Once again, welcome to the laughing matters podcast.
And as always, I am WS Walker.
And to start things off, I have a little bit of an announcement and an
announcement that I am pretty proud of.
I am quitting nicotine.
Finally, it's an addiction that I spent far too many years partaking in.
I, uh, I started smoking cigarettes when I was 14 or 15 and have successfully
quit smoking cigarettes I'll have, you know, for several years now, but I took
up vaping and while that, that does have a significant decrease in the dangers
and medical issues that come from that compared to smoking, still not good.
I'm not, yeah.
But I did, uh, I got myself down from 50 milligrams, uh, which is like 5% to
three milligrams, which is like 0.3% uh, nicotine levels in the juices I was
using, but I was still, you know, I was still cultivating that oral fixation.
I mean, I do have an oral fixation to start with, but, but that oral
fixation end of the addiction and whatever the aspect of the addiction is
that has, you know, breathing something in that has weight to it on your lungs.
That's a hard thing to kick, but I defied another way to weigh myself down to zero.
And that has been, uh, it's been pretty awesome actually.
Uh, I, so what I did was I purchased these metal D and D coins.
It was, it was a toss up between that and some pirate coins.
I'll post links for both.
You can let me know which one, uh, to help out of a decision I made.
And, uh, they're, they're about the size of a quarter.
And I came with this drawstring leather pouch.
And so I've started carrying them in my pocket in the pouch.
And each one of these coins is worth a drag off the fate.
It was a pouch of, I think 50 coins and I just throughout the day, starting on,
you know, the next day I woke up and I started paying one coin per drag off of
the vape and at the end of the day, I took the rest that was in the bag.
I put that into a drawer and then I emptied, I'm using this little baby
Yoda cup as the payout, which makes it a little bit fun because it's a picture
of him with the little cup and he kind of looks like a landlord that you're
knocking on his door is like, what's going on?
And so it's kind of like paying it out to little baby Yoda who has
become my nicotine pimp.
I didn't think of it that way.
Okay.
Anyways, at the end of that first day, I poured out the baby Yoda cup into the
bag, which was empty just before that.
I swear it comes around guys.
As I go through the day now, I put, you know, any used coins or spent coins
into that cup and it's considered spent for the day and I only have as many
coins as I have in the pouch for the day, which means I only have that many drags.
And at the end of the night, every couple of days or so I go to the baby Yoda cup
and I take one coin out and I set it out into a stack that hopefully will keep
growing and I pour the rest of my, into my pouch and one by one, I'm taking them
down and because I've assigned a cost to it, it makes it so much more difficult
to justify a cheat.
It now has a one-to-one cost that I know that if I devalue it with a cheat, the
entire system goes down and plus it makes it feel a bit like I'm shoplifting.
Nevermind that I'm shoplifting from myself, but the, the act of paying it
to baby Yoda each time that I'm paying it out to something other than me or my
pocket, it gives it just enough flavor of stealing from someone else.
If you've ever seen baby Yoda's eyes, you don't think, ah, come on, man.
I'm telling you right now, this idea helps so much and having this idea about
paying out these little pieces of gold for something that's not good for me,
got me thinking of another kind of payment from a pouch of sorts, but one
that we're not, we're not really allowed to hold the pouch in this pouch.
The coins are ours and in this way, I kind of, I kind of love imagining us
counting out X amount of coins and slapping them down on whatever nearby
surfaces that, uh, you know, where we're going to engage in whatever activity
that takes us X amount of hours.
It particularly tickles me to think of the imagery of us getting ready to
lay down for the night, you know, going to bed, all types, like the clean cut
prim guy lying down as a routine, eight coins down to the nice, even stacks
showing practiced organization or the guy that is coming in completely trashed
at the end of the night, grabbing a fistful of coins and just tossing them on the bedside
table, several of them rolling noisily off the sides onto the floor, but we
aren't reaching into the pouch.
Now it's, it's more like a disembodied hand reaches out and hands off the
requested amount of coins.
We're never really allowed to place our hands inside or outside of the
pouches to, to feel around.
You know, we have no idea, absolutely no idea how many are left or how
close we're getting to its bottom.
And since I've had this thought, I've also found myself frequently think
about those almost tangible hour coins and how I'm slapping them down for
things that would pretty certainly frustrate the owner of the disembodied
hand and the doler outer of those coins.
And sometimes the decisions we make in our life, well, they add coins to
the purse and sometimes they add coins to the bag, but they're not always
the same, but sometimes, sometimes they subtract a much larger numbers than
we would assume.
You only have a finite number of hours.
And yeah, we, we add and subtract from them, but these are the only hours
that you have left to spend contributing to the story of this.
The story of this right here, not to mention the fact that our lives, it
takes like nearly 20 years for us to get really steady on our feet and up and
running and the last 20 or 40 years, more or less, they start the process
of feebling most of us.
And yet we drift from what we know is the most important.
And so many of us drift, myself included, take for example, TVs.
Now, the majority of us do not use this technology to create or communicate
or better someone else's life with it.
We don't use it for that as much as we use it to fill time and allow us to be
sedentary in the same space.
Mobilized and comfortable, or as a way to quote, pass the time.
Pass the time.
It's a bit more like taking an X amount of those coins, those hours, if you're
remaining limited balance and waving your hand at them and going, nothing
productive to do here, or I surrender these hours for I have no use of them.
For they are useless to me.
Now people see these hours as much needed breaks from a busy schedule.
I get that.
And that you're taking time to recharge while being told stories or what's
happening elsewhere in the world or taking looks inside other people's
mostly scripted lives or watching people risk it all for a chance at
something better.
It's still surrendering usable hours when you could be strengthening an
interpersonal connection or giving thanks to God or helping one of the
countless people that could use your help right now, or that could just use
a couple of nice words or kindness or, you know, would love it if someone
checked in with them.
Just see how they're doing.
Simplest little things can mean so much.
It's time that you have that you could use to convey something that is good.
It's time where you can research or learn where you can better yourself at
whatever your purpose ends up being in this life.
For me, it's more time that I could slash should be writing and filming and
editing the shows and working on Kingdom Book Agents so I can go to publish.
A little sidebar here.
I've had several people ask why I don't just publish the book on Amazon.
Well, Amazon has this three year exclusive book that's been published
on Amazon for over a year now, which nobody else can publish the book
except for Amazon.
And I would prefer to have the option to have an agent getting a deal with a
publishing house, you know, where there would be some marketing push on the book
to get it into more hands instead of me, just me, just me out there
printing up flyers.
I am not a man of many means guys.
I'm going to need some help with this.
And I am of the sincerest opinion that if I can just get one of these agents to
read it and take it seriously while reading it, I will almost certainly then
have someone fighting professionally on the side of me trying to get the book
out in their home territory.
I mean, if you guys have come with me this far and you're still listening to
the show, I've got to think that at least most of you would agree with me when I
say that this is a message, bunch of messages that deserve to get out there
and that mankind needs to have available to those seeking for answers in the same
categories my book lies within.
It needs to be an available source of knowledge because this can't
tie with me guys.
This has to survive past me.
It's something that I will definitely have to slap more coins down on.
I'm sure that there are things in your life that if you imagine
that TV was not an option to fill time with, that there's something that you
can think of something that is definitely in the end run when keeping in mind the
things that really matter is really, really worth your time.
Sure.
Take some time to recover, to recoup, to wind down, but try not to surrender it.
Try not to surrender it as an activity.
I don't know if I talked about this on the show or if you guys know this about
me yet, but growing up, I did not have access to cable television.
I was strictly UHF band and we even had the little like dial TV.
So you had to find the bunny ears.
But I, until I went to college, I had never really gotten a chance to like sit
down and watch some cable TV other than stuff that was taped for by other
people that we got to borrow.
It was always weird seeing commercials for like HBO.
And of course we had VHS tapes of movies, which I grew up on.
My goodness.
But when I got to college, I found myself getting heavily addicted to cable television.
It was included in the dorm room package.
You had free cable all over campus.
It wasn't that I would like slot times to sit and watch TV.
It became something that was on in the background and that would constantly
turn attention away from other things to give attention to that.
It was like the things that I had to do during the day were all piled in a
bucket that was about the size of the time in which I had to do it.
And I'd been pouring concrete, which was cable television on top of it, filling
in all the gaps in between the things I had to do and the more sedentary I became.
The more that concrete seemed to harden.
It took more and more energy to get started on creating something or writing
on something or doing all the other things that I could have been doing
that would affect others.
At this point, the podcast, you can probably pretty easily take a look in your life and
see where you sit in your relationship with Surrendering Time to television.
Streaming services, YouTube, et cetera.
And yes, to answer the question that I'm sure a couple of you thought of, I would
not count time spent listening to this podcast or watching could help videos on
YouTube or other videos under those categories.
Those of you who tune in, you're hearing things that you could use to help
others in their lives, but you're not listening to the podcast.
You could use to help shape a better way of thinking and being an
acting and your decisions in this world.
And that can help you really get the most value out of your time because
while your time itself has enormous value, throw it in a bowl, the mix
in a little effort and attention.
You can turn it into almost anything.
So many of our hours are already spoken for by sleep and growing up and
working and maintenance and we need to treat those hours that aren't any of those,
especially the ones that happen during the crucial middle period of your life
with far more reverence than we do.
This as far as we know, it's your one go around in the waters of life
and humanity's history.
How much of your life, your time here with us shaping the great sculpture
called life on earth, how much of that would you prefer to get thrown out?
As time spent down the recommended video, YouTube rabbit hole, or
binge watching a series, I want you to understand this is your legacy, but I
don't want you to think that I'm calling you lazy.
I'm not saying that you don't have a life.
What I'm saying is it takes you away from the history being made of cause and effect.
Binge watching a show easily takes us out of the everyday flow of those
interactions that shape our world.
All of those things that can be used to change our lives, change our
lives, change our lives, change our lives.
All of those things that can shape another's life, their mood, and most
importantly, influence their decisions are opted out of.
And before you say that you've had entire friendships forged over a game or film
or television series, or some other fandom media, I'm simply pointing out to
you that this exists.
I'm not accusing you.
Whether or not you yourself fall into these categories or degrees of it,
that's going to be up for you to determine.
Again, I'm not making any claims that in all cases of everything mentioned,
they're definitely a yes or a no.
Though we do love labeling so many things in that way for ease of
mental categorization.
This is just to help you understand another side of it.
It's up to you to determine if this is accurate in your own life.
But regardless of where you sit on the spectrum of this, I think that anyone
that does a real honest inventory, I think that they would agree with me.
I think we all still need to look those hours that we're spending, those hours
that I'm spending, they are far more valuable than I can know.
Please be careful what you spend your coins on.
I guess that's a, that's a little bit of a pickup from the previous episode,
the fourth dimensional budget, but I got to think of that while I was walking
around the yard, I also got to thinking on another subject there.
It was, it was really foggy out.
It's pontificating.
I'm not going to be able to get into that.
It's pontificating about what it is that I love so very, very much about fog.
It fills the form of space.
If that makes sense.
It reminds us that the distance between the next thing we see and us is not just
distance, it's an actual volume of oxygen and nitrogen and other particulates.
And it's not empty space, but it's, it's filled up with a few gases and articulates.
The idea that the volume filled from me to there and being completely
surrounded on all sides, like being vacuum formed and having there be something real
and tangible filling in all of what appears to be empty space is a lot like how I feel
about how God exists in all things that we're surrounded by God at all moments.
And that there is nothing that is not made by God or made of God.
And those moments, it, it still helps to use the tree for me.
People have listened to previous episodes, probably know about the trees and my front
yard that I use as kind of a grounding point, a focal point, because it's hard.
Like when there isn't anything that isn't God, it's hard to wrap your brain around
that and talk to him sometimes.
So I find that picking an appendage, so to speak, just as speak to a fingernail.
And so I pick a tree and then, but before I do that, I picture the way the tree connects
to the earth, the earth connects all of us and the, you know, it's floating out in space,
which is also him and, and then I bring it back to the tree.
And that just makes it so much easier to have that sense, but to talk to him and give a
focal point where we exist.
We exist in the details as if we can't exist in the all.
But the reason I bring all that up is because in those moments, you know, in that fog, it
still helps for me to use a tree as a singular focal point.
But at the same time, when that fog rolls in, I feel wrapped in his presence and the
idea of every particle filling the space between me and that, or this, or that makes me feel
far more connected to all of it at every level.
And, you know, the idea that all of everything is made of God puts a very interesting light
on the statement made in the Bible of God, referring to himself as I am, and I am that
I am.
I mean, if you are every sentient being in the entire universe's frame of reference,
if you are all the frame of reference they will ever have.
If there is literally nothing that exists that is not made of you and that is not you,
what would you call yourself rather than simply I am?
Nothing is the only thing that isn't you.
If literally every thing is a part of you, including every single process involved in
naming oneself in a language, what could you possibly name yourself that could even begin
to scratch the surface of what you are?
Not to mention every name that we have out there, it already exists and refers to a part
of God when you think of it.
The only other name I could come up with would be to name oneself All.
But that still falls short of it.
I mean, it's so, the depth to it.
Anyways, in those moments in the fog, I find myself blessed being able to see and feel
that there is no emptiness within God's creations, that even what appears to be empty is filled
with Him and things made of Him.
There is no emptiness.
There is no moment in which I am not wrapped in Him in a very real and physical way.
When it fogs, I'm able to suddenly swim within Him and take deep breaths of Him.
So the next time a fog rolls in, take some time to stroll out to a streetlight so you
can see all the little particulates and have a talk with Him while being wrapped up with
Him on all sides.
Oh, if you want to get something for Him, then He'll really help you.
Oh, if you want to get something for Him that He'll really like, be good to them.
Be good for them.
And that gift's gonna be fantastic.
I'm W.S. Walker.
You're the fantastic you.
Be sweet.