Life can be a beautiful and amazing thing from time to time. Always take time to enjoy life when it’s good. Smile when sunshine warms your face, smile when your cat purrs and smile back when a baby laughs at you.
Life can also kick your ass. Disease, security, love, and money can all beat you down. You’ve got to have a touch of Rise in you to get up and go again. It can be exhausting but you can make it and life is full of survivors who can lend you an example. Here’s Invictus by William Ernest Henley
Invictus
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.
Mid-American Culture 