Lately, my moods have been lingering between happy motivation to lifeless melancholia; where I spend copious amounts of time just lying on my bed staring into space and replaying a fusion of past and future in my head.
This sort of activity leaves me feeling strangely suspended in time, where my body is living in the present but my mind is swimming to the future and dragging snippets of the past with it or vice versa.

Anyway, I was feeling really bored and decide to read one of my old loves: poetry!
Something I'd abandoned writing for a few years and resorted to analyse during the good ol' days of English class and subsequently abandoned again once exams were over.
But critique and technique aside, I really like this poem, simply for what it says.

If (Rudyard Kipling)

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 worn-out 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 breathe 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!


Perhaps why I like this poem so much is because this is something I find myself struggling with every single day; something so perfectly ideal but yet so perfectly impossible.

Anyway, my phone has decided to crank up on me and shut itself down.
I have a newer one but that other stubborn old mule refuses to read Australian simcards, so what I've been using for the last few months was my little old dear Nokia 6100; my first colour phone which I had since I was 15.

It's funny how something that serves such a practical purpose has such heavy sentimental value.
Other than the initial panic of being phone-less and uncontactable, what hit me a lot harder was losing everything else I had in the phone.




When you lose something you can't replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones

And I will try to fix you.