There’s this poem I keep coming back to lately. I ran across it one day in a book and
have found the words pretty hard to forget. It goes something like this:
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
What an incredible piece of poetry, right? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I have to say, Frost hit the nail on the head when it comes to this feeling. I’ve found that especially since graduating high school, I’ve made more of these fork-in-the-road decisions than I can remember. In fact, purely in terms of my own decision making, these past three years have been the most transformative of my life. The ten before that were even more so, but that was not of my own doing. We all have the power to choose which path to take, and though the road less travelled is a difficult journey at times, ultimately it is rewarding - indeed, when looked at with the right mindset, the journey itself can be the biggest reward. However, as the wistful voice of Frost might indicate, the one downside to this notion is that every journey comes to an end.
Let’s use this as a jumping-off point and take this poetry analogy a little further. Though Frost’s poem speaks of the courage of the individual who makes the choice to venture down the path less traveled, that’s the side that everyone knows and talks about. There is an inverse to this approach.
Sometimes, you don’t get to make that choice.
There are times in life when that grassy path turns into a raging river. Right when you get to that fork in the road, a flash flood comes out of nowhere and sweeps you down the path less travelled. This time, there’s a reason nobody travels on this path. It’s daunting, dangerous, and sometimes scary - and you don’t even get a say in whether or not you get to go. These are the unexpected series of experiences in life that are often the most transformative of all. Sometimes those moments turn into days, months, years. Where you do get a say is in how you react to these events, and how you let them shape you.
Because these times in life really are like a raging river. They erode your soul, like a fast-moving, unstoppable river that passes through your life for years upon years. But with destruction, comes rebirth. Like the Grand Canyon, sometimes the end result of life’s trials is more beautiful than we ever could have imagined. After years and years, the river of pain morphs us into a completely different person.
The thing about this river is that, like the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, it never really goes away. It ebbs and flows, but never dies. In life, this is a reminder of pain, loss, sadness…but also of progression, salvation, and renewal.
You see, sometimes this process works both ways. If you spend enough time inside one of these rivers, eventually you become an outsider. This is because the longer you gaze into that looking glass we call perspective, the more you realize how different everything really is. The river is now nothing but a memory, and though you may wish you could go upstream in time and change things, you can’t. It’s bittersweet, because now you live every day thinking about what happened in the past while anticipating a brighter future.
You have become part of the story, and the story has become part of you.
