Ready
By Roddy Carter (after Rudyard Kipling’s “If—”)
If you can sense that something vast is calling
Before its shape or name has been disclosed;
If you can drop the need to look complete
Long enough to witness what is true;
If you can bear the ache of reconstruction
Without inventing exits to slip through;
If you can step toward what would once have stopped you,
And bring your trembling willingness to something new;
If you can see that effort, once your engine,
No longer carries you toward your best;
If you can feel that success has not answered
Every sacred question living in your chest;
If you can face a truth that does not flatter,
And stay there when your pride would rather flee;
If you can hold ambition close to hunger,
And humility as fiercely as a key;
If you can feel the cost of old protections
That served you once but now have drained you dry;
If you can stay curious when assumptions
Fall from the shelves where you had placed them high;
If you can sit alone with your own thinking
And not reach out for noise to dull it all;
If you can hear a truth that lands like lightning,
And open wider where you might before have closed;
Then do not wait for perfect confirmation,
To grant you what your courage must explore.
The door is not for those without discomfort,
But those prepared to answer from their core.
The path will ask for more than words can answer.
Stand tall. Step in. Bring all of you.
Yours is the deeper life now calling;
And you, my friend, are ready for the work.
A recent conversation with a client brought me back to Rudyard Kipling’s magnificent poem, “If—”. We both love the poem, and revisiting it reminded me how powerfully a sequence of simple “ifs” can become both a mirror and an invitation.
It also made me think about the first question that sits quietly at the threshold of deep transformational work:
Am I ready?
When clients come to me for one-on-one immersion work, we are not only exploring what they want to change; we are also assessing whether they are ready to meet themselves with enough courage, humility, honesty, and determination to achieve the change they desire.
So, with deep respect for Kipling’s original, I created the above reflection for anyone wondering whether they are ready for the deeper work.
