Heart and Nerve and Sinew

There are times when life leads us to dead ends on a one way road...

It is when you reach here that you are hit by the realisation that you have 'lost'. You break, bleed, shatter. You stand alone here. Your friends left you when you weren't paying attention to their tricks. Your enemies leave, knowing you are wasted, that you will fight them no more- that they have defeated you. You lie alone on the floor of your deluded, distorted dreams- with no strength in you, barely breathing, your head bowed, not to hide your tears, displaying your numb shame; frozen and blue.

You feel you have lost your pride, your face, your dreams, your value, your soul, you almost cease to exist in your own sphere...

Time heals all things, and with the passage of it, your misery thaws; And after the realization that "All is lost", you come to the understanding that you have nothing left to lose. This becomes your power. That is the dawn after a dark, stormy, painful, seemingly endless night!

" If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath 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!' "

So, when all is lost, and there is nothing left to lose, let me fight the battle one last time...

-JB

"Invictus"

by William Ernest Henley

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.