It may not be every morning, but on a semi-routine basis, my day begins with a little pep talk to myself. Some days it’s simply a little note to myself in my head that prods me to just stand up, walk out the door and start the morning chores. On other days, it’s more of a stern talking-to or even a desperate plea to my guardian angels to allow – or force – my better self to prevail in those moments of doubt, anger or frustration.
One recent late spring morning, as the sun was granting its first gentle glow to the eastern horizon and I was gearing my mind up for the day ahead, I knew, due to the sour mood in which I seemed to find myself at that particular moment, that I needed an extra dose of motivation before I attacked the day. I was planning on doing some cowboy work, and I knew I’d have to do battle with Gus, the big grey gelding colt. I knew he was going to eventually be a good one, but my directing him to that point would require a lot of patience on my part. Patience is something that I don’t naturally possess in spades, and it has taken me some time to figure out what makes the horse tick. I eventually learned that negative reinforcement was something to which Big Grey did not positively respond, which was unfortunate, since too often that seems to be the language in which I am most proficient.
I’d allowed myself a few minutes to scroll through my social media accounts, which in itself is often a colossal waste of time. Nevertheless, I am sometimes able to mine a golden nugget of wisdom from amid the pile of trash that is so often social media content.
A high school classmate of mine, whom I hadn’t seen nor talked to in decades, had posted a partial clip of the actor Michael Caine reciting a few lines of a poem. Since I am far from a literary scholar, and I’m not really a voracious reader like my wife is, the poem was unfamiliar to me, but the tone and the words rang as true to me as anything I’d heard in recent memory. With a little internet sleuthing, I quickly discovered that Sir Michael was reciting lines from the Rudyard Kipling poem titled If.
Speaking of if: If you’ve made it this far in my little piece of prose and have found yourself losing interest, I don’t care if you read another word, but I implore you to go and read the Kipling poem. I’m not asking you to read The Jungle Book. I found it to be an amazing and wisdom-filled guide to how I wish I could live my life. Here is the opening stanza of the poem:
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 or wise:
For my immediate purposes, I realized that this was a perfect recipe for me to follow in my love-hate relationship with Gus. If I could focus on this message, the big grey and I would be just fine. But more than that, on a deeper level and a higher, most likely unattainable plane, I thought that if I can find it in myself to live by the tenets of selflessness and self-restraint laid out in the Kipling poem, I could actually become the person I’d really like to be.
If I could only hold the cuss words back
When the cow runs past the gate,
If I could only leave the house on time,
I wouldn’t be so late.
If I could ask with gentle kindness
When the calves bust through the fence,
The conversation with my wife at dinner,
Would likely not be quite so tense.
If I could care a little less
That my opinion is always right,
Or hold my tongue in disagreement,
To avoid another fight.
If I could listen to another’s voice,
And care less about my own,
I’d reap a blessed harvest
From the seeds of peace I’d sown.
My words and thoughts are far from Kipling-esque, and are born more of the chaos of my life and simple, everyday frustrations. And even though Rudyard Kipling’s magnificent words came from the experiences of a life lived a universe away from the plains of Saskatchewan or the ranches in the mountains of Alberta, it translates easily into any heart.
