It’s Sunday night. Again. The rain-soaked bush is doing its best impression of a leaky existential crisis, and here I am, wide awake, picking apart a century-old poem that, against all odds, still manages to be relevant.
I’ve spent the last two hours reading and re-reading Rudyard Kipling’s If—, that grand, stoic anthem of British stiff-upper-lip philosophy, where contradiction and idealism dance a waltz so intricate that it almost feels deliberate. And, as any good nihilist does when faced with yet another proclamation of how life should be lived, I went in with my claws sharpened, ready to tear apart its neatly packaged wisdom like a hyena dismantling a carcass.
And yet—much like every attempt to rationalize the absurdity of existence—something strange happened. The more I argued, the less I wanted to. The more I disagreed, the more I nodded. Until, inevitably, I found myself confronted with an uncomfortable truth: this might just be the best thing ever written.
The Great Kipling Conundrum
At first glance, If— is the poetic equivalent of your grandfather sitting you down for a whiskey-soaked lecture about “how to be a real man.” It’s packed with contradictions so glaring that it feels almost reckless.
– “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.”
Oh, so I should have unshakable confidence in myself, yet simultaneously validate the doubts of others? Fantastic. I’ll just exist in a perpetual state of self-assured uncertainty.
– “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”
Right, so success and failure are just figments of my overactive human ego? Tell that to my bank account.
– “If all men count with you, but none too much.”
Brilliant. I should be universally respected but completely indifferent to the weight of that respect. I’ll be sure to tell my next employer that I appreciate their offer but that their approval means absolutely nothing to me.
It reads like a masochist’s guide to emotional self-flagellation: never hate, never complain, never break, never falter. And if you do? Well, then, my son, you were never really playing the game right to begin with.
And Yet…
The deeper you go, the harder it becomes to dismiss Kipling’s words as just another relic of bygone stoicism. Because once you get past the contradictions, once you stop trying to disprove every line like some petulant philosopher, you realize something unsettling: he was right.
Every one of these paradoxes isn’t a flaw—it’s a necessity. Because life is contradictory. Because wisdom isn’t found in rigid absolutes, but in balancing the absurd contradictions that define existence.
– Of course, you need to trust yourself and allow for doubt. Confidence without self-awareness is arrogance. Self-awareness without confidence is paralysis. The trick is walking the razor-thin line between the two.
– Of course, success and failure are impostors. How many times have we thought we’d made it, only to realize we hadn’t? How many moments of apparent disaster turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to us? The moment you let either define you, you’ve already lost.
– Of course, all men should count with you, but none too much. We need people, but the second you start living for their approval, you’re a puppet on invisible strings.
Kipling’s entire philosophy, hidden under layers of old-world formality, is about resilience without delusion. It doesn’t tell you to deny pain, only to endure it. It doesn’t tell you to ignore loss, only to rise from it. It doesn’t promise success, only that if you can keep moving forward, you will be unstoppable.
The Unforgiving Minute
And then, we reach the final blow, the line that stops you dead in your tracks:
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…”
Because in the end, it really is that fucking simple. No grand illusions, no divine interventions. Just you, the minute in front of you, and what you choose to do with it. Because when everything else falls away—when life has exhausted every trick in its arsenal—the only thing left is whether you kept going.
And that’s when Kipling wins.
Because if you can do that—if you can face the contradictions, the uncertainty, the sheer maddening absurdity of existence and still put one foot in front of the other—then, my son, you’ll be a man.
Or, at the very least, someone worth remembering.
And with that, I should probably get some sleep.
Wildlife Beyond the Lens 