Get a Grip - Join Life

By John Hitchcock

Would your life suck if your smart phone suddenly went stupid?

Do you have revolutionary ideas, but don't have friends who can understand them?
Small minds cannot comprehend big ideas… and that is a scary thought.
You need courage to read this book. What you read may not comfort you, but it could inspire.
It is possible that you could walk away from reading with a confidence that unleashes your creative energies.
The life choices we make are critical. Make the right ones and you will leave the shallow parts of life and enter the depths where genuine adventure and fulfillment reside.
C'mon. Get a grip – join life. Real life.
This book is NOT "Join Life for DUMMIES."
You are not a dummy. Deep inside, you know your level of intelligence can awaken amazing actions and thoughts for you to revel in.
As you read this book, discover how The Mind Matters Most, and how you can change "suck" into success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hitchcock
• Release date: Mar 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201669201

John Hitchcock

Growing up in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State gave me the opportunity to develop and independent spirit, but also created an aloneness that eventually had to be dealt with.  Once I understood you don’t have to be perfect to be successful, life became enjoyable. My parents taught me that doing the right thing at the right time produced positive results. Mom and Dad both worked, but that did not prevent us from doing things as a family. We went camping, played neighborhood softball games, went to the drive-in theater for all the John Wayne movies, bowled together, and ate dinner (actually, we called it supper) together. My independent actions and ideas were allowed, even encouraged. Buying amateur radio equipment or a new BB-gun gave me the opportunity to find a job to pay for it. Thus, raising chickens and selling the eggs, even picking and canning tomatoes for the lady down the road became part of my middle school years. During the early years of college, my relationship with God gave me the courage to deal with some tough emotional challenges. Now, as an experienced classroom teacher, parent and grandparent, I am thankful for the parenting lessons my mother and father implanted in my heart. Those ideas are nothing new or radical, just logical and effective. One evidence of positive, not perfect, parenting that they imparted to me is quite simple – I continue to wake up every morning anxious and excited to get on with another good day!

Book preview

Prelude

After the Pandemic - Choose Courage

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Steve Jobs

If there was ever a time for you to get a grip on life, it's now.

The most universal result of the current pandemic is fear; of death, illness, isolation, loss of friends... so many different fears.

The most damaging of all fears is the one we don't fully understand. We can't put a label on it, but it resides within us. A fear making us worry incessantly about... well, pretty much everything. It's the type of fear we can't define, only feel.

Masks that hid smiles for two years, social distancing eliminating reassuring hugs, vaccines touted as protection then proving not, governmental wavering on policy... and so many more events that led us to this point.

There are dangerous results of this fear. We begin to avoid crowds. Drug use increased. Isolation increased. We lost friends. Suicide increased. Anger towards others grew.

Life became an obsession of self-protection and worry.

Healthy and self-aware people cannot live in fear. We are not wired that way.

Our lives must become vibrant, filled with hope, curiosity and confidence.

This short book can help you recover those feelings and attitudes again. Reading these simple, yet often overlooked, ideas can help you get a grip and join life again.

Chapter One

Where Does Your Bridge Go?

We build too many walls and not enough bridges.

Isaac Newton

C ome to my LIFE SUCKS party. was the writing on the bridge abutment,

I passed it every day on my way to school. One cold December morning I saw an addition to the invitation that said, Tuesday - 4:20.

In the following days I kept building images of what that gathering of obviously disgruntled teens would be like. My mind held visions of pseudo-punk, pot smoking baggy-jeaned kids huddled in one of the semi-secluded parks near us.

The disconnect between how cool they felt and the reality of how shallow and