Different Thoughts - Unified Purpose E61

Clancy Denton  0:00  
If you're not unified in your goals and dreams, and sometimes people confuse

Rick Denton  0:06  
the word unity with same. Yeah, you and I are not the same. It's that realization of how vital unity is in the empty nest, but not similarity. This

Clancy Denton  0:16  
is the loud, quiet living the empty nest. Hey guys, welcome back. Episode 61 of the loud, quiet. We're a little more casual today.

Rick Denton  0:27  
We both didn't realize you Arizona State.

Clancy Denton  0:31  
I'm glad I did, because it was cold up here, but I figured, you know, they won last night. I'll wear their because I do have a Cowboys jersey, but we don't know how that's gonna go today.

Rick Denton  0:45  
Yeah, no, we don't know how that's gonna go today.

Clancy Denton  0:49  
Yes, yeah, Chelsea's playing right now. So that's right. So am I

Rick Denton  0:53  
really supporting them if I'm not watching it? But maybe we should have done that. I'm sure there's all sorts of licensing issues if we'd had it playing on the TV in the background while we're recording. But what's

Clancy Denton  1:02  
more important a game or doing something?

Rick Denton  1:06  
Wow, way to set that up. What a false premise to set up. Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead and tell you what my answer would be, no. Actually, we chose to do this at this time. Oh, gosh, yeah, this episode is gonna be, humorously enough, we didn't plan that intro about unity and the idea of unity. And the inspiration for this episode is the calendar. So today is the Sunday before the US election, and this will release the Thursday after the US election, and so we have no idea what's gonna happen. We hope. As we were talking about that, though, and talking about what the episode could be, we got into a conversation of just hoping for unity so that what we talk about today won't be rendered moot by the time it is released on Thursday. Yeah,

Clancy Denton  2:02  
and we talked about it a little bit this week in life group there just feels like there's this, this. It's not even a cloud. It's just this almost tangible fear, stress, anger that's just out there,

Rick Denton  2:24  
and annoyance because of the overwhelming presence of political ads and spam texts that are flooding our communications. You know, even even something as innocuous as I posted my my vote picture on LinkedIn, and most folks like, yay, oh, I voted, you know, that sort of thing. And one person, hey, was just making a joke. There was no malice in this, but was saying, No, I hope you voted a certain way. And then immediately, before I even got to it, another person had posted, well, I'm sure he voted the other way, and I was able to put a humorous response back to them and say, No, boys, don't fight. We're not being political here to try to find that unity. Thankfully, they both laughed, so we're good on that one, but it is. It's that even something as innocuous as just I voted brings out disunity in people, and that's why we wanted to talk about unity.

Clancy Denton  3:16  
Yeah, and we did all, all four of us. Here's all of our voting pictures. So we all voted, and two of us, two of us voted in the same different times, though. And then Tanner voted down in Dallas, and Tegan voted in Arizona, which I love her sticker because it's got the Native American language on it too. It's really it's a cool sticker.

Rick Denton  3:41  
You and I both said, when we saw the kids stickers, that theirs are a much cooler designer, Denton County. Yeah, Tanner

Clancy Denton  3:49  
has the Dallas skyline and and the long horn. Yeah, ours were boring well,

Rick Denton  3:55  
and ours has the Snark, like I voted, did you? So we're kind of like Dick heads with ours. You know, aggressive. I

Clancy Denton  4:01  
didn't wear mine. I just

Rick Denton  4:06  
That's true. Nobody wore theirs except for me.

Clancy Denton  4:10  
So I bet Tegan put hers on her sweatshirt when she left, because she was very excited to get first time presidential

Rick Denton  4:17  
voter. I think she's voted once it was not President, yeah. So she was super excited about that, and she she did. She said, Yeah, I voted in a Pokemon sweatshirt. So good time with that,

Clancy Denton  4:31  
which doesn't matter what you vote, as

Rick Denton  4:34  
long as you got something on and you're voting, we're all good, yeah.

Clancy Denton  4:37  
So yeah, it will be an interesting this this week is going to be interesting. I mean, I all, all I hope for is that, and you and I have discussed that, that it's swayed one way or the other, which we know it's probably not going to be, but that they mark. Is so big that there's not gonna be any question, yeah, but I certainly

Rick Denton  5:05  
want my candidate to win. That would be choice one. Choice two would be, I want the other candidate to win in a landslide, and I don't know that that's going to happen.

Clancy Denton  5:14  
And I just, I just pray, you know, we all voted early, and I just pray that it's just peaceful on Tuesday, that that no one you know, gets hurt or right anything in this whole, you know, it's just, it's really, we were even, we were talking about this that, you know, when we were in elementary school and the it was time for the presidential election, you went around and told, Oh, who are you voting? You know, you did, like a mock vote, and it wasn't by ballot. It was just Yeah, and

Rick Denton  5:53  
you I told that story. So this was second grade, and it was the Reagan Carter election, and everyone in that classroom, except for one person, voted for Reagan. And I mean even our little second graders, like,

Clancy Denton  6:09  
why would you vote for Yeah, that kind of thing that know nothing about. And let me

Rick Denton  6:13  
be very clear with this, just because how I voted in second grade gives you zero indication how I voted for the rest of my life, you would be surprised how back and forth my leanings have gone,

Clancy Denton  6:22  
and so it just and and we have a couple of we have one elementary school teacher and then one high school teacher and a middle school teacher, but she wasn't there, but they all said, Yeah, we're not touching it at all. I mean, Scott was even saying he teaches AP government. He said, I really wish my AP government class was not on election day. Because he said, Just doesn't, yeah, it's just, it's, it's sad that it's come to that, that we can such a celebration

Rick Denton  6:52  
in our mental past has now been fraught with a little bit of tension, and then

Clancy Denton  6:56  
we just can't have open forum talking about it, because you just don't know what the person on either side is going to do. You know, it's just

Rick Denton  7:07  
because the yelling starts, the aggressive starts, the on both sides, yeah, no, there's, there's no side with this at all. And that's the that's what we're talking about, is that our hope is just simply for unity in whatever the outcome is, and I guarantee that right now, there are polls that are absolutely disappointing half of the people that are listening, and there are polls that are delighting half of the people. It is so 5050 that all we hope for is just a recognition that, okay, what is it that actually unifies us and that we're part of a particular country that has a particular system of government that we value highly, and let's be unified around that, rather than an individual candidate or victory, right?

Clancy Denton  7:50  
And you know, we are talking about other voices that don't particularly that have influence, but not in the political sphere, getting involved in, you know, trying to get people to go one way or the other. And so, you know, well,

Rick Denton  8:14  
I'm going to amplify that actually, not, it's not A, not yes to that. But what's more concerning to me is that there are voices who are, and I'm talking about third party actors that are just outside of our system, or anything like that, right, that their goal is not necessarily one side of the other, but rather disunity, that their victory comes from a fragmentation of our culture, of our society, of our democracy, that it is actually I might I don't know certain certain actors are gonna feel one way or the other, but most are less interested in who wins, as opposed to, let me insert something that causes discord so purposely creating content that really infuriates one side of the other, whether it's true content or not, and then the other way around it. There are these outsiders that are trying to and insiders that are trying to create disunity, and that's what bothers me more than perhaps someone who might support a candidate that I don't agree with.

Clancy Denton  9:21  
Yeah, and you know, one of the we came up with this topic or what we thought we'd like to talk about, and then we were like, Oh my gosh, it's been our entire weekend as well, because we were back in Austin doing another round in your mom's house to get some things cleared out. Do

Rick Denton  9:47  
y'all hear that for a second, like I'm looking at you Clancy, but I'm also listeners and viewers. This is what the second or third round, please, folks, if y'all have a house, clean it out before your kids have to. Yeah. If you're confused, go back and listen to the Swedish Jess cleansing episode that are, I don't know, 10 episodes or so ago. Go listen to that. Because we're not even done. We're we made great progress, but we're not done. No. So sorry for the aside there.

Clancy Denton  10:13  
You're fine, but that's what you know we were talking about. You have three parties that are involved, trying to for the same reason, the same end goal, trying to stay unified as we go through this process. And it's it's hard.

Rick Denton  10:35  
All three come with different perspectives. I love that you said that we have a unified goal. The unified goal is the, I mean, there's a series of detailed goals, but ultimately, the closing of an estate, being to that closure point and getting to that includes estate planning, it includes house cleaning, it includes stuff handling, all of that. And each all three of us come in with different perspectives. At times, if we chose to find conflict there, this would be an incredibly difficult process, and I am thankful that so far, even when there has been disagreement, there's still the objective of finding that unity in the end that allows us to have those disagreements, resolve those disagreements, and move forward without deep conflict.

Clancy Denton  11:27  
Yeah, yeah. And I think it's you know, again, as we talked about the outsiders coming in and when you've got a counsel who is telling one person, you know, well, you don't have to do any of this if you don't want to. And and the person that they're telling that to doesn't want it to be that way, but you have this person in their ear telling them, oh, but, you know, this is what it says. So you

Rick Denton  12:06  
could do things that would create disunity. You have the authority both legal, no, I forget both. You have the legal authority to do things that would create disunity. And,

Clancy Denton  12:15  
I mean, thank goodness, yeah, he's not interested in disunity.

Rick Denton  12:18  
It that really, that has really pissed us off, that there is that third party in somebody's ear trying to create a conflict when the three of us, three, the three family units, yes, yeah, could really absolutely devolve into really bad conflict. There have been so many stories of families ripped apart through someone's passing and handling of an estate, yeah, and estates that are both significantly more simpler, simpler, and estates that are more complex than what we're dealing with. Well, and

Clancy Denton  12:53  
you have three people that are on again, three, you know, families. I'm an appendage of that. So, yes, but that are on different timelines. And so yeah, it's it, it it's raw, it's emotional. And you see the differences in males and females when things you know like this about and and it is though, you know, we have to just keep telling ourselves we're all in this for the same reason. And you know there wasn't any big, major conflicts or anything, but you can see little things coming in here and there.

Rick Denton  13:37  
But I'll tell an element of this that, you know you can later decide to cut this out, but I'm certainly the mindset of just All right, let's go. Let's get this done. Okay? Object x, it's either sold, it's donated, it's absorbed by somebody, or it's trashed. And I want a decision right away. Let's get through all of that. And there are others that don't process at that same pace, and it's not that I'm right and they're wrong, and it's also not true the reverse, they're not right and I'm wrong. We just have different senses of urgencies and different paces of processing the emotional attachment to certain things, and my impatience collided with another person's desire to take more time, and we had to hit it was a little flare up, and then we were able to kind of take that back down. And you, huh, I'm gonna use the phrase we use it, but got into my ear of, hey, realize that everybody is processing this at different paces. Rick, it's not gonna be the efficiency that you're trying to force through. And that was eye opening to me. And

Clancy Denton  14:39  
I'm glad that you I'm not like patting myself on the back here, but that is another element of this. And also going back to the other topic we're talking about, everyone needs support, especially going through something like this, if you don't. Have friend, partner, spot, whatever that is supporting you along through this. It makes it very difficult, and it shows and

Rick Denton  15:12  
I'll add to that, support well first, let me agree. Sorry, my efficiency just kicked in again. Support also means not just yeah, you're right, dear, you're doing the right thing. Support means you're off, you're off track here, and you need to course correct. And that's real, authentic, true support is being told what you're doing. I don't think it's right. Re reconsider, reevaluate, take a pause, yeah, and that was good. And yes, I've been incredibly thankful for the support that I felt from you both, the opportunity to vent when I needed to vent, cry when I needed to cry, and be told I'm wrong when I'm actually wrong. And that's real support, and you gotta have that to create the unity that we're talking about.

Clancy Denton  15:56  
Well, yeah, that and just the physical support. I mean, you know, now,

Rick Denton  16:03  
before it's funny, when you heard that, there's a naughtiness that could come into that that's not what she's talking

Clancy Denton  16:07  
about. No, I mean, how about, like, lifting boxes, yeah, moving things and Yeah, going through things there is, and going three times to Goodwill, and yeah, there's,

Rick Denton  16:17  
there is absolutely, just the simple nature of going through so much stuff. Please clean out your houses going through so much stuff.

Clancy Denton  16:29  
Yeah. But what did we say? We are not in the accumulation phase of life. We are in the, I mean, even the thing, the little things that I was like, Oh yeah, no, I'd like to have that you're like,

Rick Denton  16:45  
now you did point out something to me. So we're in this theme of unity. I want to keep it there, but it did remind me of a thought, and that is unity is also kind of reminding yourself that you have different but similar perspectives. And I'm promise, I'm going somewhere with this. I could not care less about certain things, and a lot of it comes down to dishes or glassware. It's the China pattern. Don't care. Couldn't care less just boom, boom, boom. But there's an emotional attachment that exists for those sorts of things and a functional attachment that exists for those for other people. The moment that my dad's tools were mentioned, though, I had a completely different reaction. I didn't even realize it. You called me out on it later, was like, oh, no, wait a second. No, I want to take the time to go through those because there's ones that I want, both for emotional reasons and for functional reasons. And that brought me and then I think overall, brought us all to a better sense of unity. Is realizing, huh, what I was accusing the other side of. And again, we're not actually talking about other sides, but in the general principle accusing them of, well, actually, I'm just as guilty of that same thing, of needing to take the time to go through something just because I care about it. People

Clancy Denton  17:59  
value different things, you know? And so yeah, it's, and I haven't had to go through this yet on my side of the family, because both of my parents are still living and so I will imagine that it will be, you know, the same kind of process, right? So, but yeah, so, you know, that's it. We did get to do one thing that we love to do in Austin, which we haven't gotten to do. I don't, I couldn't even tell you the last time we did because every time we've been down there lately, it's been business oriented. I mean, we were, like, we were exhausted again yesterday, coming home, and so, I mean, it really does just even mental energy, it, it, it wears on you. But we did. We got to go out to Town Lake. And that's here we are on the bridge, one of the bridges in town lake. And for

Rick Denton  18:59  
those that are actually Austin people. You recognize that it is the walk the pedestrian bridge that goes under Mopac, connecting the North and the South side of town lake, or whatever it is, Lady Bird Lake now, but Town Lake to

Clancy Denton  19:09  
I still call it Town Lake, but so yeah, so we actually thought about this episode when we were out there walking around, and, you know, I said, You know what? Town Lake is a perfect example. You have bikers, walkers, you have cross country teams that are running very quickly. You have the slow joggers. You have babies with strollers. Did I say that one you have dogs? I mean all of these people coming together, and it all works

Rick Denton  19:40  
on a as it all works as long as everyone is looking towards and if you have the unified goal of we're here to have a fun. We're here to have fitness, we're had recreation. We're here to enjoy and we didn't set it up. But what this is, it's a trail. It's a crushed granite trail that goes both on the North and the South side of town lake for miles upon. Miles, and you can make it as longer, as short as you want. And if everyone is realizing that, yeah, the bikers go faster than the walkers, and that's okay, scooch over, if there's the space to scooch over, or the biker slows down, if the biker can't make it through when this baby with the stroller is kind of cruising, or, you know, the parent has to stop because the baby did something funny. Or, wait, oh no, I'm gonna get there. What? Oh, okay, the you know, then everybody's kind of cool. You get you have to go around it, even though brake lights have stopped it. Or there's the guy in the stroller.

Clancy Denton  20:33  
He must be training for something, I'm guessing, or, or

Rick Denton  20:41  
so that was the one. This has nothing to do with unity. It has more to do about chuckle, but we're watching this guy push a stroller, and then as he passes by, it was a bag of cement. First, I was

Clancy Denton  20:49  
like, Oh, it's this flower baby. And then it was no bag of cement. It's

Rick Denton  20:53  
a cement baby, but it was, and that was the we started talking about unity because of the calendar. That's what got us on the walkway, the view that realized we're in the midst of an absolute unity experiment, that if, if the if the experiment fails on Town Lake, people get hurt, if a biker runs over walkers, if a you know, those cross country teams are probably running faster than than the bikes. At times it is and you know what? And if people are just lollygagging around and wandering the tail, well, then they're messing things up for everybody. Instead, it just worked like a really good flow. Yeah, this time,

Clancy Denton  21:36  
yeah. And I don't really remember. I mean, sometimes the bikes annoy me a little bit, but this time, I will say everyone had their little ding ding Bell, and they were using their bells. And I didn't really feel, you know, like in our neighborhood the other night, we were walking, we almost got run down by some kid, teenager on a bike. I was like, did you not see us? Or right here in front of you anyways, when I just have never felt any kind of looking over my shoulder the whole time when we're out town like I don't know why. I think because it just it's always worked out there. I feel that way just walking on teal out on the sidewalk and bridges out there, there. So, yeah, I didn't have my headphones on either. That probably makes a difference, but you certainly gonna be startled. But I just feel like everyone is aware. There's

Rick Denton  22:37  
the ah, there's the realization that it is a pooled resource. It's a pooled desire. It's a pooled it's it's not something that any one person owns, that for anyone to enjoy it, they have to allow everyone to enjoy it. It's kind of the old prisoner's dilemma. Yes, someone could enjoy it if they just dominated it, but even then they really couldn't. And it's, I think that's the way of unity. It's understanding that even though my hyper desire might not necessarily be met directly, the overall desire will be met if we do this in a unified way. And you brought that up, that that's true in the empty nest as well. Yeah,

Clancy Denton  23:23  
we, you know, and we, and, I mean, I know someone else who, just, you know, is getting divorced and empty nest. And so if you're not unified in your goals and dreams and

Rick Denton  23:41  
and they don't have any exact I think that's what sometimes people confuse the word unity with same. Yeah, you and I are not the same. I was talking to someone who's about to enter the empty nester. Yeah, they were no, oh no, no. They're years away from going into the empty nest. And they're worried about it because they're worried about our whole lives have been kids and everything that we talked about. Go back and listen to episode one through 10, right? It's that realization of how vital unity is in the empty nest, but not similarity. You and I are not the same. There are things we do not agree on,

Clancy Denton  24:18  
no, but I think we have a unified goal of what our life is and will be, and we want it to be in the emptiness. That's

Rick Denton  24:30  
right, yeah, an example even comes down when we've talked about places to live or those sorts of things. I really do think that I would delight in living six months in Tuscany or something like that. I know that you would not delight in that,

Clancy Denton  24:45  
not for that long. I would love to go to Tuscany, but I don't want to live there. Yes. So yes, and

Rick Denton  24:49  
that's a great example of differences that have to be negotiated for us to stay unified. If I just stamped my feet and said, well, Clancy, we're gonna go live there, you'd say, Okay, bye, bye. And go live in Tuscany. See you later. Well, the unity is broken. No, you have to find that and and so true in the empty nest, true on Town Lake and, well, we hope, God willing, that when this releases on Thursday, we don't look at and go, Well, that was a foolish episode. Instead, we hope that it's true of our country as well. Yeah. So,

Clancy Denton  25:18  
so, yes. So go out and vote if you haven't yet. Well, by

Rick Denton  25:22  
the time this releases, don't go out and vote, because then you're committing fraud. So don't do that. I

Clancy Denton  25:26  
hope everyone voted, so at least you can, you know, feel one way or the other when the when it comes down on Tuesday, and

Rick Denton  25:40  
if you didn't vote, don't complain. So, yeah, it's very classic one. Yeah. Well, I, I root for, you know, y'all unity, the all's being the listeners and the viewer. And I root for our unity, both, you know, in life and then specifically in this empty nest experiment that we're living right now, and I'm doing a really crappy job of getting to closure, and I'm going to cut this out. I totally got, oh, the smartest guys, John hazed it, yeah. Well, no, they, they all kind of screw it up. But yeah, who knows? Maybe we'll leave this in, because it is very true that there are mistakes to be had in the loud, quiet, living, empty nest.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai