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 can make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by the 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 to wise:

If you can dream – and not make the dream 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 walk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch
If neither foes nor 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!

One time one of my sons was distraught over witnessing the depths of prejudice in some people. He had never been exposed to it in such a blatant manner. No one who has ever lived in the South would even dream of doing so…while white supremacy groups in the Northwest considered being prejudice the “right” way of being.

So my husband asked our son what he thought about forming a club, an anti-prejudice club. That would not let any prejudice people in it.

Kind of like a lot of our positions concerning ‘war’. We ‘oppose’ it…like making war upon war. Or like saying we hate haters.

I can Be FOR Peace without opposing or being against anything. Simply by seeking understanding rather then acting out of condemnation.

And excuse me for being so bold as to say…that after all the lifetimes the Dali Llama has spent endeavoring to lead people to Peace, these same people aren’t expressing they learned much.  What does that say about the efficacy of what has been taught?  Maybe it’s time they weren’t led and learned how to think for themselves and within themselves? Maybe it’s time the People were individually EMPOWERED, rather then crippled by religious beliefs of limitation ? Maybe it’s time they were freed from the brainwashing of their so-called ‘spiritual authorities’?

One of the major differences between most of us and the Dali Llama is that most of us did not have our butts wiped by someone else growing up. The redundancy of living the same life over and over and over would bore me to death over and over, too.