Life’s Lessons

The author was born in a small town in rural East Texas. He was raised on a fifty-acre-dirt farm that would only grow the hardiest of weeds, to top that off it was full of rocks. There was a small town twenty miles away in either direction. He spent most of his life on the farm plowing a mule from sunup to sunset during growing season. Despite the rocks and lack of fertile soil, his mother insisted that he keep up the farm. His father had worked in an oil refinery on the Gulf Coast since 1947. The author was born in 1947. All his other brothers and sisters had left the farm when he was born. He worked that farm until he was eighteen-years old. At that time, he was fortunate to be able to escape to college. He went to college in East Texas, then to the Navy. After which, he went to two different graduate schools. Subsequently, he moved to the South Suburbs of Chicago. He knew he had to do something other than stay on that farm. He has spent the last 45 years of his life in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He has spent most of his life as a social worker, psychotherapist, teacher, and freelance writer. These sayings, personal thoughts, and ideas chronicle the author’s experiences. These sayings in this book are some thoughts that he has considered throughout his life, as well as some of his passing thoughts. Some of these sayings are personal. He thought they would be more relevant that way. The author learned all of these from life lessons he picked up along the way. The statements are true to the best of his ability. Some of these sayings are mixed creations: they combine something he had heard before with his own creations. He did his best to stay away from popular sayings. He came across these sayings by free-style brainstorming, free-association, and forcing his brain to retrieve them. The author wrote these sayings painstakingly one by one. Some days the inspiration came and others it didn’t. Rarely did he sit down without having a thought come to him. Most of these thoughts came straight from his head. He would never want to write a book of sayings that came from another source. A few of them he had heard in various conversations throughout his life. Please forgive if he repeated any of these sayings from other of his books of sayings. Sometimes it was hard to remember which ones he had used before. He thought of these sayings quickly, but often they faded from memory like snow in a hot-frying pan before he could write them down. He wrote them over a period between January 2021 and September 2021. The categories in this book are rather fluid. Some of the thoughts could fit just as well in one of the other categories. He simply had to decide on one category and stick with it. This and any of his other books can be ordered or previewed @ amazon.com by Jay Thomas Willis.