Welcome to a new episode of the Road to Self podcast, When If Becomes When.

Reading and knowledge in any form are some of my main personal interests. As a child, reading was also an ideal way to visit extraordinary worlds and universes, to travel instantly to any place and time, to meet famous characters, to put myself in new and challenging situations, to feel and experience emotions and states of being, some perhaps unknown or undreamt of by me until then, but which awakened an echo in me, transformed me slightly, seemingly imperceptibly, and I felt that I was becoming a more complex person somehow, as if I had actually experienced a vastness of events and situations compressed into a short period of real time, but enormous in terms of experience and intensity.

I still have diaries and notebooks full of texts and poems that inspired me, which I still reread, and some of which I include in the materials, individual sessions and workshops I organize.

Today I randomly opened such a notebook and read a poem written by Kipling, If, translated by Corneliu Coposu. I will recite it in this episode. Before doing so, I also want to read you the note that accompanies this poem.

Freedom means above all accountability. Every time when if becomes when, you will experience the outcome of a choice, and with each choice you will become more confident in your personal power to take each moment as it comes. It is through acceptance that the real construction of personal authenticity begins, and the connection to true love of self and others. I will address this topic more fully in a future episode.

Until then I invite you, as you listen to the poem, to imagine replacing if in every instance ... with when, as a way of choosing a conscious, assumed and triumphant response to (self-)imposed conditioning, to limiting beliefs and convictions, to lack of self-confidence and too much reliance on external validation and recognition, to over-defining with what we hold in material space and too little in inner worth and continuous self-development, to the importance of some status that can always become perishable. I hope it will remind you that the power is within you, to restore your confidence in yourself and in your path, to inspire you in choosing to handle any situation in your life with calm and gracefully, while maintaining your curiosity and attention to yourself and the world out there, finding meaning even when everything seems to be falling apart and the courage to start over every time.

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 impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

If all that's left of your work is ruins and spaces,

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 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!