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 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!

Rudyard Kipling in Rewards and Fairies

Once you realize that all comes from within – that the world in which you live is not projected onto you, but by you – your fear comes to an end.”
— Nisargadatta

February, the ugliest of her sullen brood, swallowed Chris alive.

Tumbling and disoriented, swept along in a flood of midlife bustle, he fell into the belly of the gray beast. Bitter coils of darkness stretched before him. Beyond them, he knew, a light cast fluttering shadows into the humid air of a spring evening. But that was far from this place. And he wondered how he would ever make his way through the cold bowels of this endless month.

Detached and disinterested, Winter watched. She did not care one way or the other.

You have heard it said to love your neighbors as yourself.

A riff, if I may:

You have also heard it said that we see in our enemies what we fear most within ourselves. Jesus, that radical first-century love thug activist, sounds like he had a interesting strategy for confronting personal demons. In so loving our enemies, are we not also expanding our capacity to love ourselves? Here’s a corollary: “I will love the dark, difficult side of my neighbor-not just the warm and friendly side–and I will encourage it to express itself in constructive ways.”

To expand, Friedrich Nietzsche said, “The greatest epochs in our lives are at the points when we gain the courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.”

“Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends.

Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was.

Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill.

Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia.

Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognize him.

Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor.

And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.”

— Iain S. Thomas, I Wrote This For You