Lesson 21: Listen

Have you ever been lost in your thoughts, wondering why certain memories keep resurfacing? In this episode of The Time Smith, we step into the forge and explore the difference between reflection and suffering.

Through personal stories, analogies, and lessons learned over decades, I discuss how revisiting the past can either help us grow or keep us trapped behind the glass of what might have been. We talk about listening—to others, to ourselves, and to the truth of where we are in life right now.

Together we'll examine anger, sadness, healing, growth, and the importance of accepting our memories without trying to rewrite them. Sometimes the greatest act of listening is hearing the quiet voice that says change is possible.

If you've ever struggled with regret, replayed old conversations, or felt stuck in your own mind, this episode is for you.

Key Topics:

• The difference between reflection and suffering
• Why memories continue to surface
• Learning to accept the past without rewriting it
• Isolating anger and sadness instead of letting them consume everything
• Personal growth, faith, and healing
• Finding hope beyond your current circumstances
• Remember: If you are lost, you can be found. If you feel unloved, you are loved.
  God bless.

Transcript

Have you ever been lost in your thoughts? Randomness. A thought pops into your head and you don't know where it came from. Many times it's your past. Things that have happened that have not let you go. Why have they hung up? Let's talk about that. Hi, I'm the Ty Smith and welcome back. I hope you had time to listen to my last lesson. Divorce. Not sure if it resonated with you, but I hope you understood what I was trying to say. Please feel free to go back through all the lessons and see if there's something there that might grab your attention. The titles might draw you away, but take a chance and listen. There's information in there that might be pertinent to what you're going through. It's helped me a lot to revisit those lessons. I don't want you to think that I'm still suffering from this as before. I used to go back and try to change what happened in those moments. I no longer do that. I've accepted that. That's what happened. That was my life and this is who I am now. From everything that happened. But today, I want to talk about listening. I touched a little bit on that in my last lesson. So let's step into the forge. When you look around, what do you see? Can you envision the counter? Can you envision the stone walls? What about the elevator and the staircase to the right? There is a place to sit down, so have a seat and let's have a conversation. Listening. When people say that mistakes are a way of learning, yes, I agree. Most of the time mistakes happen because we're not listening. The avoidable. What exactly is avoidable in this life? Can we live a life so perfect just because we listen? MM. I'm not sure. But I can say that there are moments that I've lived that I've taken the advice of those that spoken into the moments of what I'm deciding, of what I'm living, and I've just listened. But mistakes have a funny way of making us learn to. I think that's why it keeps drawing us back, to just say, well, I want to try it myself, but at what point of trying it yourself? Is it just too dangerous? I love to build engines and fast cars and drive fast, and I've always been somewhat of an adrenaline junkie, possibly because of my past wanting to chase a high or just wanting to feel something in the midst of numbness. So then what do we do? We try for ourselves. Driving fast on a public road is not the safest. If you go to the track or a closed road and you do what you want to do in regards to driving fast, then so be it. But people might say, don't drive fast on the road. You'll put others in danger, you'll put yourself in danger, and you could listen to that. Or you can go ahead and make the mistake and maybe encounter someone else who's driving fast. And you could end up in a road rage incident. I understand you want to try it, but I would say that in that listening might be the better option. It's not to say that you wouldn't be able to drive fast, but you take it to a road where there's no one at you. Don't put yourself and others in danger. But maybe we need something a little more relevant to listening when I talk about memories and I talk about the forge. And we won't be going down today. It'll just be up here. A place that we can just listen. Memories shouldn't be changed. Suffering is reliving moments when we've gone down to these doors and we go in. I've advised. Don't touch anything, don't move anything. There's the analogy of a bull in a China shop. Glass everywhere but the mass of that bull in the horns. It wouldn't take much for him to knock everything over and to make a mess of that shop. But when you go into memories, and this is the part that I would advise that we listen to, and I'll explain why we should listen to it, is that when we go into memories and we visit something in our childhood that for some it could have been lived yesterday. And for others it could have been lived for decades ago. And you can't change what happened. And when we revisit those memories and what that is, is going into your head, you can get stuck in your head. You can get stuck in those thoughts and have no escape. To be able to get away or to get out while reality happens. Visualize life behind the glass that though you might want to touch reality, you can't. Or from reality you might want to touch the fantasy of what life could have been. Never aligning yourself to what is happening in the moment. Which is this? I'm a man talking about memories. I set time aside. It's a process. I go into my shop. Sometimes I sit in a car in the silence. Other times I go into a game room I created for myself with consoles and baseball cards and things that I could look at that remind me of the things I like. But that's the reality. Sometimes you hear birds in the background because I'm walking, or I'm sitting on a bench, and I think to myself about what can come of the things that happen. But when you think too deeply into those memories and we begin to say, well, if I could have avoided this person in the past, then maybe this would have happened. Or if I didn't take that job, or if I didn't talk to that person that day. Or if I didn't feel this way, if I would have responded in a certain way. And all these outcomes, the possibilities of what life could be, I could tell you that as I tried to fix my life and I would look into the mirror, I didn't see the person that I am now. I had decided that I won't change the memories any longer, which means I wouldn't question what happened. If you look at the lesson of the lens of suffering, it took a long time for me to go into that room and just observe. It's never been something I want to watch. Life becomes a real r e e l a real life real. And that's where you can get stuck in your head attempting to change what has passed in my life. That's where people have said, I think he's crazy. I think he's mad. Something happened and most of the times those things were said when I knew I was stuck in that moment, stuck in that moment while I did well jobs, while I was in classes of trying to get better. When I sat across the table from my parents life behind the glass, the reality in front of you, living in a fantasy of wishing things were different. When we step outside of that lens and into reality, which is just getting out of your head, it allows us to see and to listen to ourselves about where we really are at in life. Take a look in the mirror and what do you see? When I would look in the mirror, I would say very negative things about myself. And then I began to read verses in the Bible. I began to read books that would encourage me to gain a different perspective about my brokenness, about myself, reflection, imagery. And I would tell myself, yes, you are broken, but you're not bad. Yes, you have reason, but you're not understood. And that's okay. I understood that I was going through something. Sometimes we have support and sometimes we don't. I've explained some of that in previous lessons. The things that we do for ourselves and the things that people help us do community, family, friends, spouses, significant others. So what are you hearing today? Are you hearing that there's a possibility that you can change? Are you hearing the possibilities that life can improve? That joy can come into your life, that what you are today is not what you were yesterday, but definitely the hope that you can be something amazing. Three separate stages, and yet it's still you and you can live in hope and not be delusional and knowing that something great is ahead. And that's the reason for a different type of pain, which is not suffering. When we grow as children, if you recall, your elbows might have hurt your shoulders and your knees, those growing pains. But it passed and then you became the size that you are. But suffering is repetitive. The same thought over. I wish that didn't happen. I wish that didn't happen. I wish that didn't happen. Over and over and over again. Wishing that there was an improvement. With no actual change, you must nourish your body to grow so that you don't stunt your growth. And you must nurture your spirit. Reading the Bible does that. Being encouraged with the good book. It does that. Positive affirmation. It does that. Reflection. Saying good things about yourself. Seeing that there's small advancements. Celebrating those small moments. You might go into these memories and hate everybody. You might move everything. Time of day. The age that it happened. Everything. Maybe the next time you go in, you don't. You don't change as many things. And to be honest with you, that's what it takes, is that you walk it back just little by little. It can't all be done in one day when it's severe. Remember, I'm not a doctor. I'm just sharing a perspective. And this wasn't done in one day. The countless times that I would go into memories and multiple memories at once, I would go down into these halls, these different levels, and open every door and see all the junk and kick everything around being so angry. And at times I would have brought stuff to those doorways knowing that it belonged in that room. But I would kick it so far down the hall that I had to do the work to go grab that anger and place it back in that room so that I can deal with that anger. And I hope you understand that visual is that, yes, you might be angry, you might be mad, you might be sad. And in some cases, and I'm sorry, you might be depressed, isolated. If you're mad at what happened that day and you haven't overcome the anger, just be angry for that moment. In that circumstance. Don't be mad at the world. Just be mad at that moment and bring it back into there. Don't let it be on every level of your life. Don't let it be in every room. Isolate it so that when you come back to a moment, a day when you really have to deal with that anger, it will be one on one, not a thousand different anger's against you. The sadness is the same. Yes, it does tend right to engulf us, to encompass us. That there are certain days when you wake up and you don't want to get out of bed. You don't want to face the reality. And sometimes it's the reality that that sadness has just taken over everything. At times, you might have somebody that wants to be the sunshine in your life and smile, and you can't receive it because that sadness or that emotion has taken over everything and we miss out. And you can drain people. You don't want to do that. You don't want to sap people of what they're going through in their life if they have joy. It's not there just so that we can take it. It's there to share that. We can also have joy. It's for everybody. And at times we don't feel that we have access to that joy. So we take it from people. Listen, that joy is accessible to everybody. Directly and not through a person. I'm happy for when people have joy. I'm not envious of that. Even in my worst situations, it wasn't so much that I wished I had that. I would tell myself, I'm gonna have that. I'm gonna have peace, I'm gonna have happiness. And in my life, it took a lot of prayer. There was a lot of brokenness. There were moments of crying. There were moments of my body tearing and my mind being so split, not knowing what was reality and fantasy, but just like being in a tunnel and seeing that light. I decided to change. I decided I needed help, I decided that I could pray. I decided that I could can rely. And in my life it was Jesus. And it has been a long journey. I've stated many times that I'm not a young man, but I made that decision when I was seventeen and I walked this life for decades and I wanted to give up. I wanted to give in. I wanted to relent. I wanted to just surrender and throw in the towel and wave the white flag. I kept going. And actually what I gave up on was the anger. I gave up on the sadness. I gave up on thinking everyone wanted to attack me. I gave up on the idea that I was a target. That everyone hated me. So just wanted to show you something. And I hope that as we continue to walk this journey and the bits and pieces that you let me speak into your life, that it can encourage you, go back and listen. If I'm going to be honest with you, my son has helped me a lot with the editing, and I've made it challenging for him and not on purpose, but it's not having the right equipment on my end, the right microphone, the right setting, a place that I can record. In fact, as I walk around, I just talk. I'm just talking into a microphone now. So I do apologize if the quality isn't always good, but I hope you can look past all that and see that the message can change your life To finish that thought. I thank my son for helping me and encouraging me to get this message out. Share it with somebody. You might not be as broken as they are. You might have stumbled across this podcast and seen a picture, something that enticed you to listen but take a chance. Look into the whole catalog. So thank you again for allowing me to speak to you. And thank you for listening. And remember, if you are lost, you can be found. And if you feel unloved, you are loved by me. I am the time Smith. God bless. You.