Come across something often enough, and become blasé about it. Approach it with cynicism, and it seems melodramatic or over-the-top. (Is there a better word than "cynicism" here?) Have enough apathy, and it's simply "meh". If, however, always meant very much to me, and always will, because of the context in which I first came across it: my father brought home a big framed poster/photograph and gave it to me when I was somewhere between 10 and 12 years old. This was in the early 90's.
If—
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 all 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!
— Rudyard Kipling
10 responses so far ↓
1 Hugo // Fri Oct 10 10:56:13 2008
Now you get to tell me all the places you think I fail! ;)
I think I'm pretty good at trusting my head, but in getting out there and doing things, e.g. in the professional sphere, I would do well with much more confidence in the way I interact.
I think, too much, but I believe I'm not making thoughts my aim. I'm usually aiming for some result, some purpose, behind the thinking (and blogging). So that's good. More important though: do more. May too much thinking not inhibit getting the job done...
Quote-mining, anyone? Knaves! From now on, I shall call the quote-miners knaves!
Kipling is not advocating gambling, I choose to believe: he's just sketching out a scenario. The point of this one is how you react to such a scenario.
Notice personification of Will, Triumph and Disaster. Poetic, personification is poetic. sigh.
Of crowds and kings, I think of many differences in life experience and situation/culture, but I also think of rationalists, thinkers and atheists, and the more poetic/feeling artists, and the fundamentalists, and extremists, in no particular order.
Here's the clincher, the highest priority for me at the moment:
I'm nowhere near sixty seconds. Subjectively speaking, I feel like I'm at... 34 seconds on a good day, 23 in a bad week. That, then, is my highest priority.
Quick reStructuredText Intro
The last three paragraphs were written like this:
Without so many linebreaks though: linebreaks do nothing, paragraphs are separated by blank lines. Intent to get blockquote. I didn't bother with verse in the comment, I think this is fine.
Now You!
What do you see in the verse/poem that you find interesting? What do you think I should learn from it? What can you learn from it? Etcetera... if you feel like it. This is just a friendly little invite, a nudge.
And if you make a mistake in the reStructuredText, I will fix it for you. Hopefully I can improve my code this weekend, which will provide e.g. a preview if you make mistakes in your markup. And will make one important performance improvement on the site (which you might not notice).
2 Pieter // Tue Oct 14 12:20:45 2008
Feeding the Poem Refinery, and it chugs out:
3 Pieter // Tue Oct 14 12:22:15 2008
oh btw, tags in recent comments. new lines not respected?
4 Hugo // Tue Oct 14 15:20:06 2008
I certainly like your refinery... it helps remove the verbosity, now you can summarise to your son one day, instead of giving him Kipling's verbose poem. Though interpreting greed into the last bit seems to indicate your refinery isn't operating from a context in which it has already internalised the rest of the poem... ;-)
Tags in recent comments: that will be fixed a couple of subversion submits in the future, it's been on my nagging to-do list for quite some time. The plan is to use the first seven words of the reStructuredText source of comments, rather than the first seven words of the rendered HTML.
I've fixed your newlines by changing your comment source to read like so:
reStructuredText was an idea I got form Stefan. I see two options for improving the situation: better documentation (some examples) of the core features commenters need, or... offering basic HTML with a good sanitizer, and substituting line breaks with <br>. Using reStructuredText was less effort to the programmer than writing or finding a good sanitizer, so that's what I went with. Bad CPU usage though: next subversion commit will be about rendering to HTML only when the RST source actually changes, rather than for every. single. request.
5 Hugo // Tue Oct 14 15:44:05 2008
Back to the refinery's summary:
detachment
Are there times when excessive detachment can be a bad thing? (Methinks in the balance between detachment and mindfulness/experience you find Zen?)
Rather, the "problem" here is distilling it into "detachment" can separate the concept from the original example and thereby make it prone to excesses.
So do narratives and parables carry an idea much better than a distilled sound-bite of wisdom due to the context provided by a parable?
6 Linda // Fri Oct 17 12:57:29 2008
Thank you for sharing this. You share some great stuff! Oddly, I had not read it before. Perhaps because it is written for boys(?) I think it speaks to all of us, though, regardless of gender. I find it interesting that the ideas I get from the poem are slightly different than Pieter's:
7 Linda // Fri Oct 17 12:59:03 2008
Yay! I got it (reStructured Text) right!
8 Hugo // Fri Oct 17 18:47:34 2008
Congrats. ;)
With regards to distilling ideas down to words: here's a strong case of labeling. Chances are that the ideas/concepts you're both have in mind and are pointing to have much more in common than the precise words chosen to point to those concepts. Combine his words and yours in parallel, and you could end up with a more accurate multiple-word descriptor of the idea.
In the end, the question is still: does the original poem not maybe describe the ideas better than the distilled words? Or in a more language-independent fashion, as words may change over time but the scenario sketched by the poem provides timeless context?
BTW, I have in mind the writing of a post on the dangers of MBTI labeling... (Again we're talking about a tool that can be both useful and harmful. Like words. Like religious traditions. ;)
9 Linda // Sat Oct 18 05:22:34 2008
Well, of course. That's why he's the great poet and we're not. But poetry is an art; and like any other art, there are many ways to perceive it.
Great!! Bring it on! ;-) (BTW, with any tool, it's not the tool that is harmful but the people misusing the tool.)
10 Pieter // Wed Nov 5 19:44:12 2008
Oh yeah our refines could hardly compare with the original ;) But you get a glimpse of what struck me when I read it. I tend to do this when I encounter self-help books, as I try to find why something makes sense to me. Comparing with Linda's version was fun.
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