If

[Cyrano]

We are living in hard times. I've always found Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If," inspiring and have always kept it in mind during personal difficult periods. Perhaps it can help you to some small degree.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!


That last line is chauvinistic, but I'd hope that if Kipling were writing it today, he would include women.

[FM123]

1. Love it!

Thank you!

[malchickiwick]

2. Ummm...maybe it's just me, but i get ZERO inspiration from the author of The White Man's Burden.

That sick, poetic justification of colonization, genocide, and white supremacy is a blot on his legacy, and any statues of Kipling probably belong in a garbage dump, in my humble opinion.

[Mme. Defarge]

3. Memorized the "If" for girls in the eighth grade.

Thanks for the memory.

[bottomofthehill]

4. Polonius advice

There, — my blessing with you!

And these few precepts in thy memory

See thou character. – Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportion’d thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,

Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not expressed in fancy: rich, not gaudy:

For the apparel oft proclaims the man.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

[Mme. Defarge]

5. I memorized that, too!

Were you in Mrs. Beaulieu’s eighth grade class in Portland, Oregon?

[bottomofthehill]

7. Parochial School in Boston.

Also learned this one

Around the corner I have a friend,
In this great city that has no end;

Yet days go by, and weeks rush on,
And before I know it, a year is gone,

And I never see my old friend's face,
For Life is a swift and terrible race.

He knows I like him just as well
As in the days when I rang his bell
And he rang mine. We were younger then,

And now we are busy, tired men:
Tired with playing a foolish game,
Tired with trying to make a name.

"Tomorrow," I say, "I will call on Jim,
Just to show that I'm thinking of him."

But tomorrow comes--and tomorrow goes,
And the distances between us grows and grows.

Around the corner!--yet miles away . . .
"Here's a telegram, sir . . ."

"Jim died today."

And that's what we get, and deserve in the end:
Around the corner, a vanished friend.

[Walleye]

6. One of my favorites. Also Kipling's "The Gods of the Copybook Headings "