I once wrote a poem that posited that there was nothing to be said that hadn’t been said before… and just like in life sometimes we have to make the same mistake over and over again before we learn the lesson behind it, only to forget it and make the mistake once again, so too great thoughts are reiterated time and time again because we just don’t get it the first time.
Many think today (or four years ago) that our government is more corrupt, our leaders more disingenuous, our way of life more in peril than at any time in the history of man, and yet Sir Thomas More felt the same way in 1516 as did Plato when he wrote “The Republic.” Perhaps Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager encapsulated it best with the phrase “Everything old is new again.”
A lot of what you’ll find in HTSYMBBABM is nothing new, most of it was published in 1910, or even earlier in the Bhagavad Gita. I and most of my generation had to memorize the 1910 version in the fourth grade. It was a good lesson then, it’s a good lesson now, and it’s a good lesson for the coming year.
If
Rudyard Kippling, 1895,
first published in his collection of short stories and poems, Rewards and Fairies, 1910
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 imposters 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 breath 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!
