If - the human endeavour

The quest for higher ideals.

We humans spend much of life trying to work out how to lead life. It’s a personal quest but also a relationship quest. Occasionally we can pause to reflect on this. Rudyard Kipling was a person of his time. But in his poem ‘If’ he speaks across time. He sets parameters for us which surely are impossible to achieve. But perhaps, ‘if’ only….

If—

Rudyard Kipling 1865 –1936

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 wornout 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!

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This poem is in the public domain.

(A quick note: If Kipling had written this today perhaps he may have crafted his words in a gender neutral fashion? But I think we can do him the courtesy of respecting the time and context within which he wrote and still absorb the universality of his message.)

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