Kipling

By Mick Holien

I was rummaging through some notes of possible story ideas as I waited for the barrage of basketball and football games of interest to get going and I ran across something I have often used in presentations, graduations and really anywhere that I am searching for something to write about.

It is prose penned by Rudyard Kipling, one of the most recognizable writers of both prose and verse in the United Kingdom near the turn of the Twentieth Century.

At the young age of 42, Kipling won a Noble Prize in Literature in 1907, making him the prestigious award’s youngest recipient.

He also was accorded laurels as British Poet Laureates and several times was considered for knighthood which he declined.

Known as a writer who could “inspire passionate disagreement, but a particular verse did anything but for me.

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing this and blaming it on you,” he wrote in a piece called simply “If.”

“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you: 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.”

He continues “If you can dream-and not make dreams your master. If you can think-and not make thoughts your aim.”

“If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it in one turn of pitch-and-toss.”

“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings-nor lose the common touch … If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.”

“And which is more you’ll be a man, my son,” Kipling wrote to son Beatty

Sage advice?

I think so. Just sayin’

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