If

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;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

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

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

~ by Rudyard Kipling

What do you want to be known?

The road not taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

~ Robert Frost (1874–1963) ~
Source: Courtesy of Mr GC Chong

To remember me...

The day will come when my body will lie upon a white sheet neatly tucked under four corners of a mattress located in a hospital busily occupied with the living and the dying. At a certain moment a doctor will determine that my brain has ceased to function and that, for all intents and purposes, my life has stopped.

When that happens, do not attempt to instill artificial life into my body by the use of a machine. And don't call this my deathbed.

Let it be called the bed of life, and let my body be taken from it to help others lead fuller lives.

Give my sight to the man who has never seen a sunrise, a baby's face or love in the eyes of a woman. Give my heart to a person whose own heart has caused nothing but endless days of pain. Give my blood to the teenager who has pulled from the wreckage of his car, so that he might live to see his grandchildren play. Give my kidneys to one who depends on a machine to exist from week to week. Take my bones, every muscle, every fiber and nerve in my body and find a way to make a crippled child walk.

Explore every corner of my brain. Take my cells, if necessary, and let them grow so that, someday, a speechless boy would shout at the crack of a bat and a deaf girl will hear the sound of rain against her window.

Burn what is left of me and scatter the ashes to the winds to help the flowers grow.

If you must bury something, let it be my faults, my weaknesses and all prejudice against my fellow man.

If, by chance, you wish to remember me, do it with a kind deed or word to someone who needs you. If you do all I have asked, I will live forever.

~ Robert N. Test ~

Source : Courtesy of Mr Chong G. C.

Click here if you wish to be a donor

A promise - 10 years late

Mr Chong was my lecturer back when I was in college. I couldn't really appreciate his classes, what with the subject of taxation. I never really got to know him then. I can't even remember how I came to make appointment and had dinner with him after I left college. It was then I discovered his passion for wisdom and sharing. His kindness to me was not something you encounter everyday. He gave me many things. CDs of soothing music, books on living, and most precious of all - his own compilation on words of wisdom. His dream was to be able to share those wisdom with as many people as he can. I remembered telling him, I would love to help. I had initially planned to produce it in words file, and send to him. Then I left for study in overseas. When I came back, I had some personal issues to settle. Then a job, then another job, and another and another. Life just kept moving at a momentum that I myself has lost track of the pace. The thought of not keeping this promise struck me once a while, but new things never failed to crop up and occupied my mind. There is always something new, something interesting, something captivating.
Then I had a baby. The day I held her close to my heart, world around me stopped for a while. I retraced my foot steps and learn to stop and smell the roses again. And this is one of the roses, passed on to me by Mr Chong, that I would like to share it with you:

"Every beauty and greatness in this world is created by a single thought or emotion inside a man" ~ K. Gibran