‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster
and treat those two imposters just the same’
’If you can make one heap of all your winnings
and risk it on one turn of pitch ‘n toss…and lose
and start again at your beginnings’
’If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you’
A few short lines from Rudyard Kipling’s inspirational poem If-
I would encourage those of us here who may be feeling down-in-the-dumps after the past week, to read this poem. Whenever life has delivered me a blow, I have taken comfort from doing just this.
If you ever visit that ‘green and pleasant land’ I recommend a visit to Burwash in the High Weald of East Sussex. Just down the road from The Rose and Crown, a wonderful 15th century pub, you’ll find Bateman’s, Rudyard’s home for his last 30 odd years. There is something ethereal about wandering in the footsteps, and along the pathways of people like Rudyard Kipling.
I have recently been pondering where things are going, given the days of wine and easy, abundant, cheap money are ending. This at a time when the rising cost of living, in fact the rising cost of everything is insane. Inflation is rife, wages are stagnant, uncertainty, anxiety, dare I say fear abounds…and not just here but everywhere.
For mine, the actions required to combat these headwinds will cause the world to enter a recessionary period. As Paul Keating once said…’this is the recession we had to have’…to get things back on a sustainable footing.
What does all this mean for our battler?
Certainly the past week or so has been painful for most of us, and as much as I respect the 1000 eyes and all the research they do to provide us with hope and encouragement, for mine we need a little more. I refer to what our CEO said in an interview shortly after the AGM...’at this year’s AGM I talked about activity, at next year’s I will talk about results’
For what it’s worth I am a true believer…I believe during the next six months we’ll begin to see these results…results which will make all the blood, sweat and tears shed by Peter, Anil and those unknown at least to me…so worthwhile.
’If you can dream, and not make dreams your master’