Have you seen this movie staring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon? If you like the popular and inspiring sports movies that come out every year, you’ll enjoy this one too. Invictus is a poem written by William Ernest Henley in 1875. Henley lost his leg below the knee to tuberculosis of the bone when he was 25 and wrote the poem from a hospital bed. He went on to live an active life until his death at the age of 53.
The poem is meaningful and deep. The movie highlights how Nelson Mandela took inspiration from it as he suffered through nearly three decades in a South African prison cell. In many ways, our lives are today are surreally comfortable and safe despite the personal challenges we each face with ourselves and with our circumstances…We are blessed beyond measure.
Do the easy stuff to take care of you today. Eat more vegetables and fruit. Drink your water. Give your body the nutrients it needs to heal and repair. Then enjoy this poem and spend some time working through the big stuff too.
Invictus is Latin for “unconquered”:
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 gait,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
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