Living With “If”
Part One: Keeping Your Head (emotional regulation under chaos)
These are personal reflections written from experience, not authority.
The poem If by Rudyard Kipling was first shown to me during a difficult period in my life as a teenager. The man who introduced it to me influenced the course of my life in ways I couldn’t see at the time, but which I can now trace clearly. It helped set me on a path that led from a small town in Ireland to travelling widely and living a life I never could have imagined back then.
It’s a poem I return to a few times each year. Every time I do, something new seems to surface. To me, that’s the mark of writing that lasts. I decided to write down my own reading of parts of it, not as a definitive explanation, but as a reflection shaped by time and lived experience. The only way I can do that without muddying the water is to take it in pieces. What follows is what I see as the foundation of the poem. Emotional stability under chaos.
The opening lines read,
“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;”
I don’t read this as a call to heroics. It strikes me as something quieter and harder. Psychological sovereignty. In many ways it feels like the first real moral task of adulthood, even though it’s rarely spelled out. What it seems to ask is that you don’t allow the chaos of the crowd to invade your nervous system.
When things go wrong, people don’t just panic. They look for somewhere to place the blame. Group thinking takes over and the search for a scapegoat begins. If you are competent, visible, or simply different, you often end up carrying that weight whether you deserve it or not.
There’s a lesson here that usually only arrives with time, and it’s subtle but important. The poem does not say if you can fix the chaos. It says if you can keep your head. That distinction matters. Especially because many people, and men in particular according to much of the psychological literature, are wired to fix problems as a first response. The truth is, many situations are beyond what any one person can repair.
Why does that matter? Because you cannot act ethically, intelligently, or courageously if your emotions are hijacked. Before you try to fix the world, you have to become someone who cannot be easily destabilised by it. This isn’t about emotional suppression. It isn’t numbness. It’s containment. Emotional regulation, not denial.
Losing theirs and blaming it on you is a line that feels uncomfortably precise. Chaos produces anxiety. Anxiety looks for explanation. Explanation quickly turns into accusation. Blame becomes a way to offload responsibility. That’s understandable. It’s deeply uncomfortable to look in the mirror. It’s far easier to hand responsibility to someone else than to carry it yourself.
If you accept blame reflexively, you collapse. If you reject all criticism reflexively, you become arrogant. Kipling seems to understand this, which is why the next line matters so much.
“Trust yourself, but make allowance for their doubting too”.
This is where the poem sharpens. It becomes genuinely sophisticated. That single line guards against two equal and opposite failures. On one side is fragility, where your sense of self depends entirely on approval. On the other is grandiosity, where you assume all doubt comes from stupidity or malice.
What the poem asks for is harder than either. Self trust without narcissism. Humility without collapse. That doesn’t come automatically. It requires updating your understanding of the world over time. You hold your ground, but you listen. That, to me, is maturity.
At its core, this section points to a few quiet truths. Emotional stability comes before moral action. Self trust has to be tempered by openness to correction. Crowds are not wise under stress. Responsibility begins with internal order. In simple terms, you put your own house in order before trying to do that for anyone else.
Most of what I write comes out of a small number of demanding disciplines. Martial arts. Craft. Forging. Farriery. These are places where inner disorder shows up quickly. Where losing your head costs you something. Where restraint matters more than force. Because of that, they’ve shaped how I read ideas like this. The feedback you get from these domains is immediate and honest.
I want to touch lightly on some biblical parallels here without getting lost in theology. Regardless of how someone views religion, there’s something worth paying attention to in the way certain ideas repeat across cultures and centuries. Concepts that survive tend to do so because they point to something real about human nature.
One example is Jesus standing before the crowd during his trial. He is accused publicly and falsely, surrounded by hostility, yet he does not react emotionally or defensively. That silence isn’t weakness. It’s mastery. It mirrors the idea of keeping your head when everyone around you is losing theirs.
Another is the story of Job. His friends insist his suffering must be his own fault. They are confident, and they are wrong. Job maintains self trust, listens, and does not collapse into self hatred. That is exactly what it means to trust yourself while still allowing for the doubt of others.
There’s also the story of Moses and the golden calf. The people panic in uncertainty and descend into chaos. Moses does not join the panic. Leadership, in that moment, begins with not becoming possessed by the fear of the crowd.
Proverbs puts it plainly. “Better a patient person than a warrior, one who controls his temper than one who takes a city”. That’s almost a direct moral paraphrase of this opening stanza.
I don’t think it’s an accident that this comes first in the poem. Before courage, sacrifice, endurance, rebuilding, or risk can mean anything, there has to be inner order. Without it, courage becomes recklessness. Sacrifice turns into resentment. Endurance hardens into bitterness. Leadership slides into tyranny.
Periods of social breakdown tend to begin with emotional contagion. The antidote, historically and psychologically, has always started with self command.
If you cannot remain psychologically intact when you are falsely accused, doubted, or surrounded by panic, you will eventually become either a victim or a tyrant.
The first victory is internal.