Remembering: If you can…

Julia ♦ November 11, 2020 ♦ 2 Comments

This is our older son, Drew, at Bodega Bay, CA, around 2002.

Lines from one of my favorite poems, If   by Rudyard Kipling:

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…

Update on 11-11-13:
I see that I still wasn’t adding any comments to speak of.  I suppose Kipling’s words speak for themselves!  But I also remember that I was petrified of publishing anything online for the world to see. To see the original post with comments, look here.  I see more familiar gravatars on this one!  Does anyone identify with some of the situations Kipling describes here?  I know I do!  But the older I get, the more I know what he meant when he called “Triumph” and “Disaster” both imposters.  It’s just that they never seem so at the time…

This post was first published seven years ago today, and was itself a re-post of the second post I ever published on this blog, eight years ago today. That original post is linked above.

Also, the original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.