Rudyard Kipling’s “If” Revisited

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

If…..

By Rudyard Kipling

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!

 

If…..

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

 

If you continue to dream big

Even when but a trifling of your dreams ever come close to reaching fruition and those that do are ultimately blown to smithereens…..

If you insist on anonymity for glorious deeds performed in service to the underprivileged

Even as other faux “humanitarians” slyly go about making their good deeds known to the public and then stand back waiting for plaudits to flow in their direction…..

If you never lift a fist in unrestrained anger…..

But do not demur from violence if all evidence indicates that it is the only recourse to a just settlement

If you finally manage to summit that far-off, unclimbable mountain you’ve dreamt about all your life…..

Only to discover sans too much disappointment that it was an illusory molehill all along.

 

If you can adhere to the strictures of the Golden Rule…..

Even when no one else does and they are laughing at you and calling you a sucker and an ignoramus and a fantast

If you are willing to accept the risk of offering your own life in a calculated gamble to save that of another whom you don’t know personally, purely because you recognize your life is no more vital to humanity’s future than theirs

If you are not afraid to boldly say “No!” on principle when everyone around you is screaming out “Yes!”, and the clamor keeps getting louder and louder and the pressure on you becomes greater and greater…..

Yet you nevertheless choose to stand your ground and not back down even one inch to placate the screaming masses

If you are not afraid to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…..

Even when such blunt honesty means you will wind up losing all of your so-called “friends”.

 

If you choose to be on the side of right early in the game…..

Even when others of lesser scruples coolly wait before casting their lots as they cynically estimate who the likely winner will be

If you listen to your brain but ultimately follow your heart on matters of conscience

If you treat the leper in exactly the same manner as you treat the prince

If you fall down, fall down, fall down, fall down…..

But never once fail to get back on your feet so you can determinedly continue onward with your Sisyphean march.

 

If you are wrongfully accused and thereafter shamed by the masses…..

Yet still manage to wear a big smile on your face and maintain your undying faith in the underlying fulsomeness of humanity

If Heaven incinerates and Hell freezes over…..

Yet your faith in good and steadfast opposition to evil never wavers one iota

If you march to the beat of a distinctly different drum…..

Yet don’t try to use that as an excuse to drown out the beautiful music created by the assembled symphony with your singular cacophony

If the light at the end of the tunnel proves to be the proverbial onrushing train…..

Yet you nonetheless stubbornly refuse to give up even after being run over and crushed by the locomotive for the forty ninth time and counting.

 

If God or fate or whoever or whatever oversees our daily existences scorns you time after time after soul-testing time…..

Yet you still refuse to take the bait and angrily renounce Him and His strangely punitive ways

If good people curse you while wicked people praise you…..

Yet your inner compass bearing remains as fixed on True North as when normalcy reigned and will undoubtedly reign again in time

If you continue to fight the good fight…..

Even when no one ever explained to you what the rules to the fight were in the first place

If you can honor consciousness as a daily gift rather than a daily burden.

 

If you confront the bully in no uncertain terms even when the bully is your physical superior and you know for certain that he is going to whip your ass

But making a stand on principle shall forever remain an inviolable tenet to you

If you do not feel too insecure to always apologize for harmful deeds done, albeit unintentionally

If you value the future—mankind’s future–more than the past and use that philosophy as the foundational benchmark for every action you take

If you find yourself surrounded by fools, but they think they are geniuses and mock you for your actions yet you don’t strike back with logic and thoughtfulness because those are foreign languages they don’t understand and never will.

 

If you can leave the Earth a better place than you found it, irrespective of how tiny that improvement may be

If you can dispense more love than hatred every day you walk the face of this planet

If you recognize and embrace the fact you are a privileged visitor to Earth as well as to the realm of consciousness—no more important and no less important than every person who preceded you and every person who will succeed you

If you truthfully don’t know whether God or a Supreme Being exists, yet can eternally exercise proper patience and restraint with those who hold strong and diametrically opposite opinions without even a shred of evidence to support their positions

Then, my friend, the Earth and everything associated with it will be yours to savor for the remainder of your time upon this grandiloquent little satellite of the Sun

And—what’s more—you will be, not just a man, but–far more importantly–a noble, reverent exemplar for all of humanity to look up to and mimic.

• After careful consideration, he decided to forgive with however much sincerity he could conjure despite the fact he hadn’t really done anything wrong and was not the principal instigator and party to blame insofar as a grossly overblown misunderstanding. This was quite simply the easiest course of action for him to take even though it may not have been the technically correct one, and it did inarguably make him feel better and did resonate better within the hallways of his conscience. That does matter in the big picture. That should count for something, shouldn’t it? Peace of mind cannot be easily corralled or quantified, but it does exist just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning in the east or Donald Trump will tell another lie.  Carrying around massive guilt akin to a three hundred pound yoke weighting down one’s shoulders for twenty four hours of each day can be exhausting as hell, both physically but especially emotionally.  The avenue of action he was considering was therefore preferable to him; this way was better.  Simply apologize and relieve himself of the tranche of guilt he was feeling, despite the fact that guilt was ninety nine percent artificial and he had done nothing egregiously wrong to incur such disproportionately harsh punishment from the other individual.

• …..he realized that he was growing older and fatter and slower and more languid, but what really cemented this thought and resonated in every molecule of his body was a much-needed alteration in one of the favorite expressions he frequently chortled. Instead of saying, inveterately accompanied by a hint of disbelief, “That young lady is young enough to be my daughter!”, he now found he had to amend the expression to correctly state said young lady was young enough to be his GRANDDAUGHTER!  And this stark realization did little for his ego, and made him feel all the more old and worthless and irrelevant…..

• …..there was only a hint of dawn scraping the far edge of the eastern horizon; Old Sol had yet to put on his work boots and was still shambling about the celestial kitchen grouchily searching for his misplaced eyeglasses. The air outside the house was still, frozen, eerily silent…..yet undeniably teeming with promise.  Everything seemed to be waiting for something important to happen.  What?  I don’t know yet.  But not a living thing stirred, not even the ubiquitous flock of sparrows that ordinarily mounted a noxious cacophony from the unseen innards of the huge spruce tree standing sentinel over the far end of the driveway.  Nor did the two furry white dogs that typically bustled around the front yard as though their tails were on fire and their appetites could never be sated.  Nor did the pair of bluejays that under virtually any other circumstance could be heard raucously jeering from one of the myriad maple treetops encircling the property.  Something important was about to transpire, something monumental, something of biblical proportions……….a new day was about to commence!!!  And every organism in nature stopped to pay their respects to this regular, yet unerringly seminal, event.  For such is the texture of life, and such is the way of the cosmos, that today may very well be the final time each and every living creature is afforded the opportunity to experience this greatest of all miracles—the miracle of sentience and the miracle of life on Earth.  Death can happen cruelly and suddenly and unexpectedly to everybody and every living thing, and oftentimes does. The animals we share our pygmy-sized planet with know that instinctually, and we hominids damned sure better understand this plain fact as well lest we suffer the consequences without ever having truly appreciated our preternaturally glorious fortune…..

• …..after all those years of unspoken closeness—after an era cast in cement that should have been capable of withstanding even the most stalwart unmovable, irresistible forces—I could feel the two of us beginning to drift inexorably apart. We were gradually headed in opposite directions with no prominent headlines announcing this unexpected divorce.  It wasn’t a tangible thing either, something right in your face, something well-defined and readily identifiable that a person could easily understand and wrap their arms around and perhaps do something about if that was one’s desire.  Rather, I could just sense that a severance was happening, that our once-close relationship was slowly evaporating into thin air at the behest of fate, much as one senses it is going to imminently rain long before any ominous dark clouds begin rolling in on the western horizon…..

October Winds

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

Curse the cold, rainy, October winds!!!

Slayer of summer!

How dare they rear their ugly heads and unmercifully chase away those long, intoxicating days of the fair season

And replace them instead with gray, choppy, diminishing equivalents

Featuring harsh mornings and raw afternoons and sub-freezing nights and gusty, frothing gales

Violently stripping away the huddling, scarlet leaves from those towering maple trees that border our yard and morphing them into diminutive Tilt-a-Whirls which fill the angry air with their non-stop whirring

As they morosely begin their penultimate plunge at the behest of gravity, spiritedly performing a final, last-ditch pirouette into the drab, hibernating grass

Only to unceremoniously rot into rich humus in time if they are not first raked away by overzealous yardmen.

 

Oh, the October moon is wondrous indeed!  No doubt, no doubt!!!

And he eclipses his less luminescent cousins from last summer with ridiculous ease

But over what sterile landscape does our lustrous friend govern??

Let us sit down and count the ways:

One bereft of noisy, merry children, who are long since dispiritedly slouched over tidy wooden desks, semi-listening to pontificating teachers as they find themselves cocooned yet again in boring, tan, brick schoolhouses.

One bereft of ice cream, which has long since been stashed back inside the secondary freezer out in the garage, and even now is involuntarily retreating deeper within that appliance’s bowels as snoopy henchmen peer and sort right past it, intent on heatable, more seasonal delicacies.

One bereft of sensual, tantalizing, copper-toned skin, which long ago disappeared beneath ugly sweaters and thin nylon jackets and ubiquitous blue jeans, acutely sensitive to the plunging mercury in an antiquated thermometer nailed to the red siding of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century, pastoral barn.

One bereft of Old Sol, who oversleeps later each and every morning, and when he does finally struggle up and gets moving languishes further and further away from the celestial zenith.

And, finally……one bereft of beautiful, melodious songbirds, which hastily packed their bags in September and quite sensibly scrambled off to warmer climes when the first ominous hints of Fairbanks, Alaska crept into our weekly weather forecast.

 

Yes, the October moon is proud and majestic all right, but over what type of sterile landscape does he govern?

A dying carcass is all–Road kill!–life slowly seeping out of everything one surveys as the fading days of October slowly crawl by.

And by Halloween…….by Halloween, the landscape around here will be fully and unequivocally dead, with rigor mortis intractably settled in and autumn’s obituary already composed and sitting right next to the printing presses, soon to be published for all eyes to see, screaming out loudly and obnoxiously from the second page of the local newspaper.

 

Curse the cold, rainy October winds!!!

Go ahead—Curse them loudly, I say!!!!!  

They totally deserve a severe unneighborly upbraiding.

Slayer of summer, you are!! 

Chickenshiiiiiiiiit!!!!!!!

Return whence you came and let summer live on forever!

Return whence you came………NOW–THIS VERY MINUTE–I SAY!!!

And let me live on forever instead.

 

For as the landscape around me dies with each successive October

 

So, too, does a small part of me……

• Don’t feel the need to be perfect. The need to be perfect in everything you do puts loads of pressure on your shoulders that you surely don’t need; you will ultimately wind up closely resembling Atlas collapsing under the weight of the world, and who really wants to be that sorrowful, overmatched guy?  Futilely pursing perfection makes you scared to attempt new projects because you know whatever result you achieve, however laudable, can never measure up to that impossibly lofty standard.  The fear of failure impairs you, restrains you, suffocates you, enslaves you….…prevents you from tackling life with total, reckless abandon. Yet that is what you undyingly want to do–eternally!  And while you obviously want to do your absolute best in any endeavor you commit to, shuck perfection aside as a primary goal and aim for excellence instead.  Not only will this new mindset offer you greater satisfaction for a job well done, it will also bestow upon you something majorly more important in the long run:  Peace of mind.

• “…..recent cosmological evidence indicates there is a massive attractive force tugging on our Universe, slowly pulling the entire thing toward it like a gigantic magnet.” Pregnant pause while the gathered throng of people took some time to digest this startling, little-known new fact.  A little girl sitting in the front row of the auditorium was especially entranced with the compelling revelation.  She immediately raised her hand and excitedly asked the famed, bearded astronomer standing behind a lectern at the front of the capacious room and an individual who was widely known to be an avowed atheist, “Do you think that great big magnet might be God?!”…..

• Not all days are created equal; some sprout wings and soar magnificently into the stratosphere, never to be forgotten, while others head in the opposite direction at a rate of speed not soon to be forgotten either. An individual has some control over the outcome of each day, but not a lot; destiny holds much tighter control over those celestial reins.  Basically, you just have to buckle up and go with the flow and make darned sure to bring along a positive attitude intertwined with a cheerful smile wherever the whims of fate deposit you on any given day.  The alternative?  Guaranteed inevitable disappointment.

• …..the “Glory Days” didn’t seem so glorious back when they were happening, back when he was constantly being bullied by that fuckin’ prick Dan Dickhut, back when his face waged incessant war with itself in the guise of non-stop eruptions of unsightly acne, back when the prettiest cheerleaders in school stared right past him and focused their gazes on the star athletes instead, back when high school cliques were more prevalent and demanded greater loyalty than notorious street gangs, back when you were either “cool” or “uncool” and there was no room for hybrids between the two classifications…….yet everyone kept insisting those were inarguably the best years of his life, so these purveyors of common knowledge must be right, of course; why, pray tell, would they NOT be telling the truth? Forget the onerous memories; his memory must have been betraying him all along.  Those teenaged days of yore had to have been the best, most joyous years of his life, and he had just somehow lost sight of this obvious fact during the long ensuing interval…..