A Word Before the Ride Begins: The Introduction to My Book Grit, Wit & Wisdom
Note to the Reader
This post includes the full Introduction to my book, Grit, Wit & Wisdom. If you’d like to discover where the pages lead next, don’t miss out on what’s ahead! The complete book is available now on Amazon.com.
Life certainly has a way of keeping things ‘interesting’, doesn’t it?
It lets us settle in and grow comfortable—sometimes just long enough to forget how fragile that comfort can be. One moment, everything feels steady and familiar—our routines, our relationships, our sense of direction.
And then—without asking our permission—life shifts.
A plan falls through.
A door closes.
Something changes that we didn’t see coming, and we find ourselves navigating ground we hadn’t prepared for.
What once felt reliable suddenly feels uncertain.
And yet through all of it—through the change, the disruption, the unexpected turns—one thing stays the same: life doesn’t stop and wait for us to catch up. It keeps moving forward, regardless of how ready we feel.
That can be unsettling… but it can also be clarifying.
Because when life won’t slow down, we’re reminded of just how much we need something unshakable to hold onto. And if we’ve lived long enough, we’ve begun to understand that clarity rarely comes in advance.
It comes in the walking—step by step, one day at a time.
The Choice That Shapes Us
The truth is, we don’t always get to choose the circumstances life places in our path, but we do get to choose how we respond to them. And that choice matters.
Every setback, every detour, every plan that doesn’t play out the way we’d hoped offers us the chance to do more than just react—it offers the chance to grow. Usually not in sudden, dramatic ways, but in quiet, steady ones.
We can let hardship wear us down… or we can meet it with the kind of wisdom that only comes from a life examined with honesty and humility.
And part of that humility is accepting that we won’t walk through this life without challenges or fault. None of us will get everything right—and that’s not the measure of a meaningful life.
What matters is whether we’re willing to learn, to adjust, to grow into something better than we were yesterday.
The kind of growth that lasts requires guidance—but not the kind that shouts or demands attention. The wisdom we need rarely arrives wrapped in scholarly grandeur.
More often, it comes quietly—in the simplest of truths, passed down through generations, shaped by experience, and sometimes spoken with a touch of humor that gives us a welcome smile before we realize just how true they really are.
Wisdom in Old Boots and Weathered Sayings
It’s a curious thing, really.
The sayings passed down from the Old West—those unpolished turns of phrase shaped by weathered hands and hard-won days—have a way of cutting straight to the essence of things. They’re often amusing, sometimes blunt, but almost always anchored in something lasting.
At first glance, they may seem like little more than relics of a bygone era—entertaining, but not particularly profound or relevant. But if we let them linger, give them space to breathe, we begin to sense the weight beneath the wit.
What seems casual at first often carries the fingerprints of a life shaped by hardship, humility, and a long view of what truly matters. Beneath the humor, there’s clarity—about character, perseverance, and the kind of faith that isn’t just spoken, but lived when no one’s watching.
The Power of Simple Truths
There’s a rare brilliance in that kind of brevity. To distill something learned through failure, suffering, or grace into a phrase that endures—it’s no small feat.
That kind of insight doesn’t arrive early in life, nor does it call attention to itself. It’s carved from time, pressed into language that’s as unassuming as it is unforgettable.
Mark Twain understood this well. He had a knack for turning a sentence into a mirror, reflecting more than it first appeared to hold. “I didn’t have time to write a short letter,” he once mused, “so I wrote a long one instead.”
While he may not have been the first to pen similar thoughts, he delivered them with the kind of timing and weight that gave them life. The deepest truths often arrive wrapped in simplicity—not because they’re shallow, but because they’ve been sifted down to what endures.
You don’t just hear words like that—you feel them.
And when you do, they stay with you.
What We Leave Behind
Perhaps that’s part of what drew me to these old sayings in the first place. Beneath their simplicity, there’s clarity that speaks to lessons we’re all still learning.
With time, I’ve come to recognize just how deeply that kind of wisdom has shaped my own steps.
The road behind me holds no shortage of instruction—some lessons revealed themselves simply and quietly; but the ones that left the deepest marks were often learned through hardship and failure. Experience has a way of teaching a man whether he’s paying attention or not.
For most of us, the wisdom we carry forward is the kind that’s lived, tested, and proven over time.
And that’s what the pages of this book are really about—not just stories and sayings, but the deeper truths behind them. They offer us a place to pause, reflect, and ask ourselves what kind of life we’re building.
Is it a life that reveals the kind of integrity, faith, and character we’d like to pass on?
It’s a question worth asking. Because the way we walk through this life—how we treat others, how we handle challenges, how we hold to what is right—will leave a lasting impact.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are always leading by example.
The question is:
What kind of example will it be? Will it strengthen those around us, give our children something solid to stand on, reflect the values we claim to believe in?
Or will it leave them searching for something more?
And any consideration of our values must also include consideration of our faith. Faith is not an afterthought—it’s the foundation. Faith runs quietly through these pages—not to preach, but to point.
I’m no theologian, and that will be evident soon enough. But truth is truth, and each of us must decide what we will do with it.
The wisdom of scripture, the grace of God, and the foundation of faith are not just ideas—they’re the anchor in a shifting world, the steady foundation of eternity.
My aim isn’t to push. It’s to invite—to remind us to look in that direction and consider what it truly means to walk a life of purpose, knowing in our hearts that we were never meant to walk it alone.
A Gift to You
As I bring this introduction to a close, consider this: if this book found its way to you through the hands of someone else, don’t overlook that.
Take a moment to appreciate what it means.
They gave it to you because they see something of great value in you. They believe in you—maybe even more than you do yourself. They care about the kind of life you’re building.
Maybe they see a strength in you that you haven’t fully realized yet.
Maybe they simply wanted to say thank you—a quiet gesture meant to strengthen the truths you already live by.
Either way, they cared enough to let you know that who you are now—and who you’re becoming—will shape the lives of others in ways you may never see.
However you found your way here today, I’m glad you did.
… Trusting God’s steady hand to guide you,
K.L. Wyatt Tokar