Invictus

Sometimes life seems challenging. Small things are big things. You lose a pitch or get rejected by a boy. You get stuck in traffic or your son asks you for money again. You can´t get a job or you have a pimple. Small things stir up our feelings, our fears, our insecurities. But every time it happens, I try to remember the poem Invictus that gave Nelson Mandela hope during all those years. 


Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. 


William Ernest Henley