Sometimes, you just have to commit and see where the idea takes you.

A month from now I’m going to do something on this blog that is going to challenge me to write like I’ve never written before. So let me give you some context.

Most of us have heard of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “IF”. For a refresher, here it is in its entirety.

Now, some of us (yours truly included, years back) may have seen it featured in an article or two and paid the mental equivalent of “lip service” to it as we breezed through the verses to get to the meat of the article. It’s similar to Teddy Roosevelt’s, “Man in the Arena” in that respect. We know it and sometimes it just comes across like, “Yeah, yeah, If you yada yada yada, good poem tho, bro.”

Over the last five or so months, I’ve found myself returning to this poem by Kipling again and again, really chewing on the verses and a few weeks back I had a thought: If you divided the prose up, one could have some sort of daily “devotional” where one meditates on a verse or two for a day…

So that is my challenge and intent come the first day of Fall, 09/23/2019, I’m going to make a daily meditation or devotional. At my first count, I had it divided into 18 segments of individual study. Eighteen days is a rather odd number for a devotional project, and since some could easily be bunched together, I took to the division again. Finally coming up with 15 days worth of content.

It’ll be a three week venture, with one piece of content per day being delivered during the “traditional” work week, Monday – Friday. The plan is to keep the posts no longer than 500-700 words, so only a couple minutes worth of reading for you each day.

A good handful of years and existential crises ago, I was serving in a church, primarily the college aged congregants as some sort of a lay-pastor. I didn’t hold an official office, neither was I on the payroll… but the “kids” (some of them only a few years younger than I) seemed to like calling me “pastor”. When I served in that capacity I enjoyed being able to teach and exhort, though I did it a bit different than just blabber on from the pulpit.

Anywho… on to the point.

The point is that sometimes we lose things in translation from the text, or it just becomes white noise since we’ve read or heard a given text a ton of times. I had learned, from a favorite author of mine at the time, to inflect tone into the words of the text when I was teaching. It helps to bring out new life into a often heard line. As in Shakespeare, to recite any of the famous soliloquys with a monotone voice makes one want to sleep. But to put inflection and color into it… well now the listener and the speaker can receive new life and meaning from the text…

No… I will not be performing IF. You can rest easy.

Do the words call for an aloofness? Or perhaps an intensity, or maybe slightly joking? Was the verse meant to come out soft, like a whispered secret that desperately needed to be shared? These things aren’t just for acting, but like I said, can bring out a whole new “aha” moment to something you’ve read again and again.

With that in mind, I give you “The Way of Men” Author, Jack Donovan, and his rendition of the subject matter so you can see what I’m talking about. I thoroughly enjoyed the way he spoke this poem to life. Like in many things, this version isn’t the “gospel”, the one true way to emphasize the poem. And there are others, just search YouTube and you can find them.

But it’s still a damn good rendition.

One final word…

I’m no life-coach or anything like that. I’ve never fooled myself into believing I am. By the time I launch this, I will have already observed my 40th birthday come and go. I’m a man. I’m a father. I’ve held multiple management positions, some more successful than others. I never went to college. I just worked and raised a family and did the best I could with what I had. And it is from this masculine frame of reference that I’ll draw from.

This is a project, an experiment and as such, I would love for you to chime in to the conversation as we go through each verse. Please share your thoughts in the comments, and since the comments have to be approved by me before they are made public, if you don’t want them made public, just let me know!

Who knows, maybe the next time I do a project like this, I’ll include what you have shared (protecting names and details where necessary, of course) in order to produce a far richer experience!

Make sure to subscribe to the blog, follow me on Facebook and/or Instagram so you don’t miss out on this fun little project.

Be on the lookout for the IF Project!

Coming: September 23, 2019.