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.

"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost

Probably the most famous poem in all of American literature, "The Road Not Taken" grabbed my attention several years ago when Grant had to memorize it in fifth grade.  In his incessant recitations of it to prove to me that he had it memorized, I ended up memorizing it.  I never appreciated poetry when I was younger.  Steve Hubbard, Joe Wingard, Bev Smith, and all my other English teachers tried, and I did what many of us did: I learned it enough to pass the class.

But years, later, having taken many roads in life, I find that I relate to this poem on a deep, deep level.  As is always the case with Frost, he leaves it ambiguous.  He doesn't tell you which road he took.  Genius.

It seems like everywhere we turn, someone or something is telling us to go this way or that!

Here are a few examples....

Follow the leader, he's on a Honda. 

Think different.

Fly the friendly skies. 

Never Stop Exploring.

I actually chose BMW instead of Honda.  I own a few Apple products.  I prefer the cheapest airline. And I think The North Face is the third biggest fad company in all of recreation, behind Huk and Columbia.  (Seriously, how many people wearing a TNF backpack at LBW this fall actually know where the north face is?? But I digress....)

In the film Quicksilver, Kevin Bacon's character said something I've never forgotten.  Having lost his family's wealth in a risky move on Wall Street, he becomes a bicycle messenger.  While describing the freedom he feels on the bike, he says to a former colleague "the sign says 'one way east,' I go west: they can't touch me."  Boom.  An individual in New York!

Back to Frost....

In stanza one, he stands for a long time, looking down one path, and then he chooses the other.  In the second stanza, he says "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."  He goes on to say in stanza three that "both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black."  I think he's trying to console himself, and that perhaps he thinks that it doesn't really matter which path we choose, but I'm no Frost expert.  

But it is his last verse, he says that the path he chose made all the difference.  And this is true to the point that it's almost a "well, duh" conclusion.

Every day we choose a path. And the butterfly effect, at least according to Andy Andrews, assures us that the path we choose will affect people for generations to come.  Good lord, that's sobering.  Every decision we make takes us further down a path, and one day we'll be somewhere...anywhere...in life, and we'll turn around and look back whence we came and we'll see the choices we made.

The beautiful thing is that WE GET TO CHOOSE!