Keep Your Foot on the Accelerator As You Drive Up the Side of the Mountain.
INVICTUS - A poem by William Ernest Henley (1885–1977)
We live in challenging times. But then, Humankind has always endured difficulty, contending with accelerating technological changes, recurring encounters with disillusionment and betrayal, and ultimately, struggling individually and introspectively for Reason and Purpose. As a friend (a much older gentleman than myself) once told me, "I believe I was born a' walkin' and I been a' walkin' ever since my first rememberin' of life. I don't know why I keeps at it. I'm a' headed somewheres, I s'pose, but I just don't know where that 'somewheres' is. I keep goin' because I just don't know how to stop." Concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl said that the very search for meaning is the force that keeps us alive.
William Henley's poem, INVICTUS, was one of my late father's favorites. He had it written on a raggedy piece of folded paper that he kept in his wallet. By my reckoning, that poem was a part of the armor which he donned to face each day of his troubled trip through a world which he perceived as very unkind. I understand now that he often wished for the peace that he believed accompanies death, but that he lived because he just could not could not bear the thought that his life, what he had lived of it, would amount to nothing. He lives on in me in my search for light of meaning in a seemingly chaotic world enshrouded in darkness.
I plan to make something of my life, such that I will look back upon it as a blessing and not a curse. It is my intention to make some positive changes in this world that will live past me. Take heart, suffering brethren. Every day is The First Day. Every day presents a chance to join hands with a kindred spirit, to discover something, to solve a minor mystery and to find the source of that distant light -- to maybe even touch it.
Life is a chance. And where there is a chance, there is hope. And where there is hope, there is the strength to continue onward. --Douglas Castle
| Invictus |
| OUT of the night that covers me, | |
| Black as the Pit from pole to pole, | |
| I thank whatever gods may be | |
| For my unconquerable soul. | |
| | |
| In the fell clutch of circumstance | 5 |
| I have not winced nor cried aloud. | |
| Under the bludgeonings of chance | |
| My head is bloody, but unbowed. | |
| | |
| Beyond this place of wrath and tears | |
| Looms but the Horror of the shade, | 10 |
| And yet the menace of the years | |
| Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. | |
| | |
| It matters not how strait the gate, | |
| How charged with punishments the scroll, | |
| I am the master of my fate: | 15 |
| I am the captain of my soul. |
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