If you can find just about any damn excuse to treat a friend, to celebrate, to commiserate, then damn well take it! That’s the stuff that the good life is made from
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:
I remember my school teacher introducing it to us at a time that I simply couldn’t appreciate it. I presented a different poem to him, one I found with little effort or meaning, and he looked me soberly in the eye and gave me a low mark.
He must have questioned what the point of his career even was dealing with a kid like me, and I wish I could go back in time or reach out to him now (if he’d even remember me) and tell him that - yes, it took a few decades for it to sink in, but his efforts to better my wordly horizons with the written word did in fact reach me at a fundamental level, and his teaching career was not in vain
If you can find just about any damn excuse to treat a friend, to celebrate, to commiserate, then damn well take it! That’s the stuff that the good life is made from
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---
One of my favorite poems
I remember my school teacher introducing it to us at a time that I simply couldn’t appreciate it. I presented a different poem to him, one I found with little effort or meaning, and he looked me soberly in the eye and gave me a low mark.
He must have questioned what the point of his career even was dealing with a kid like me, and I wish I could go back in time or reach out to him now (if he’d even remember me) and tell him that - yes, it took a few decades for it to sink in, but his efforts to better my wordly horizons with the written word did in fact reach me at a fundamental level, and his teaching career was not in vain