Back at the Ranch

Chalk it up to traveling, or living so far from "home", or maybe just New York, but I haven't been one to be nailed down to anything. It could be the fact that public opinion seems to change with the wind, or that I'm surrounded by adolescent males who would rather just break wind. It can't be that, because I could care less for public opinion, and my bacheloric diet allows me to express my "public" opinion with equal if not greater flatulence. It could be the fact that I just made up the word bacheloric. Maybe it's the people who cry out for relative truth and acceptance, but they're usually the same people who get upset with me about leaving my dog in the bed of the truck, in which case it couldn't be that because relative truth is completely illogical and they are the same people who call me to take care of the raccoon that's digging through their trash... which is the beauty of relative truth, it allows you to check your personal beliefs at the door when they are inconvenient for you. It seems more and more that we are crying for a relative God, but that's another story of for another time. I guess the point is, if you couldn't tell from the tirade you just read, it's not that I'm insecure about where I am or what I believe, it's that for the life of me I can never seem to give a concise, accurate overview of why exactly I do what I do. I have not doubt that if you know me well, at some point this has to bother you. I could give you a fifteen minute dissertation as to the reasoning behind my love of Alabama football... and not even get into Bear Bryant (apostasy?). I could give you a compelling argument as to the allegorical nature of golf, and it's ability to teach a young man that golf, like life, isn't as much about where you are, but where you're going--you're next shot. I could rant and rave for hours on end about the things I believe in, both petty and significant, but if you knew me you'd stop me before I started.

Instead of trying to share what I've learned, impart some limited knowledge from narrow experience, I go to a well much deeper than my own; from the pen of Rudyard Kipling, a poem

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 imposters 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 wornout 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 breath 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!

~Rudyard Kipling

I have made it no secret in the last 3 years that my mission is making men, and even less of a secret that I am a long way off myself. I once asked my boys what "character"means, the closest answer I got was "the part you play in a movie." From what I can tell we get it from a Greek word that means "etched in stone." No matter the weather, no matter the circumstance, easy or hard, blue skies or gray, you will always know what to expect from a man of character, because he's unchanging, he's "etched in stone." May the words of Rudyard Kipling offer to you just a small share of the wisdom it's imparted with me... it's accomplished so artistically that which I could not, a concise, well-thought comprehensive Measure of a Man.