If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same …

At age nine (or thereabouts) I met Rudyard Kipling as I flipped through pages of “The Best Loved Poems of the American People.”

It was a book I frequented, guaranteed to be full of laughter and tears, poetry to meet you in whatever condition you arrive. It’s been on my mind lately, so this morning I ordered a used copy from Abe’s Books.

In Kipling’s poem “If” his words stretch across a lifetime of encounters and challenges of one human being, presumably a son.

My basic takeaway is, “If this can happen and that can happen, and you’re still standing, you have succeeded at life’s journey.”

The example atop this blog has stuck with me over seventy decades. In it he talks about two imposters—triumph and disaster. The advice is to treat them the same. Imposters? They can seem very real at the time. Gloriously real and painfully real.

Yet they both offer an opportunity to see ourselves for what we are. Bold, sweet, fleeting, flitting through our lives, and eventually out again.

They are incidents in a day, a month, a year. They are parts of the whole, but they are not the whole.

In us, if we are paying attention, these incidents can lead to wholeness. Paying attention is crucial.

Here’s a link to the full poem: https://poets.org/poem/if