To the Mentor: Borrowing Words
Sometimes my words will not do. Their circumstances reveal I am truly out of my depth. I cannot give what I do not have.
But this honest appraisal that I may not have words does not mean NO ONE has words. In such moments, I rest in the fact that I am held by the words of others, others WHO DID know, feel, perceive, identify, empathize.
THEIR words, then, become MY words. Although borrowed, it takes nothing away from my responsibility to keep, cherish, steward, protect, polish, consider these lent words as I would a friend's car or their lawnmower or their camera. Borrowed things are not less valuable because their were not original creations or possessions...they are in some ways more dear. Sometime during the lending phase, we decide we will not be able to do without and we obtain our own. Having tested these loaned things, we become believers.
I want to offer, every once and a while, some of the borrowed words that have made me, I have memorized or sent to others.
I was re-reading these words that appear below on my sweet, handsome, maturing son's 16th birthday this month when it occurred to me that mentors and protégés the world-over would be fortified to have such words spoken to them, spoken over them, spoken from within them.
So, here are some borrowed words that always do me good. They are by Rudyard Kipling. The poem is often just called, "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!
Source: A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1943)
