The Road Not Taken

 

The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

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.

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Mountain Interval.  1920.

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The author Paulo Coelho had this poem by Robert Frost on his blog the other day (but with a different picture). On Facebook, Coelho added the comment: “ALWAYS chose the road less taken”.

Reading the poem, though, I felt less sure whether that was also Frost’s decided opinion? I searched a bit more, and then found this note:

Robert Frost on his own poetry:
"One stanza of 'The Road Not Taken' was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England: Was found three or four years later, and I couldn't bear not to finish it. I wasn't thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. He was hard on himself that way."
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 23 Aug. 1953

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I too know people who are hard on themselves that way. Occasionally perhaps I also tend to be a bit hard on myself that way. But most of the time I try to tell myself that not all choices are as clear as being a choice between “right” vs “wrong”. Sometimes… we just have to choose a road and see where it takes us.

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Look closely at the pictures at the top. Which one do you like better? Actually, one is the mirror image of the other, before I framed them (in Paint Shop). You’d have to know the spot where the photo was taken, I think, to tell which is the “right” one.   

 

 

Quotation of the Week (33/2010)

Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Choose An Identity

I wonder how many times in my “career” as a blogger so far (1½ years) that I’ve faced that choice? Usually I am already logged in when I read blogs and comment, so just skip right to the publish button – and so I was today… but because the content of what I had just been writing was about identity, suddenly the choices stood out for me.

Heather had a post about the struggle of being oneself (well, that’s the short version of my interpretation – you might form your own by visiting her blog). And it set me thinking back on various conversations with people over the years… 40 or so… about how we look upon ourselves and how we think that others see us; and sometimes those images are surprisingly wide apart.

Moreover: sometimes what we think that others are thinking about us is not even what they are thinking at all, but turns out to be only what we are thinking that they are thinking. And on top of that, what they are thinking about themselves might also be very far from what we are thinking that they are thinking!

Was anyone able to follow that? ;) 

The bottom line is that we all have our identity struggles. Most of us have a lot of roles to juggle about during our lifetime: in the family, in school, at work, in church, in different groups of friends, whatever.

We “log in” and accept certain rules of behaviour in one context, keep more of an “open identity” in another, and choose to be “anonymous” in a third.

Often we tend to fall into the same pattern automatically, in the same kind of circumstances. And we may think no more about it than we usually do when Blogger tells us to “Choose an identity”.

Perhaps sometimes we should stop and think a bit more about it?

Writing this, I also keep getting bits and pieces from Paul Simon’s album Surprise weaving in and out of my thoughts. Link goes to his website where the titles of the songs on this album can be seen, and if you click on the titles you get the full lyrics. (Only wish I could provide the music, too.) My problem is that it’s hard to choose just one or two quotes; the whole album really deals with related stuff. From the first song How can you live in the Northeast to the last one Father and daughter. Okay, so I’ll choose one quote from the first and one from the last…

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Weak as the winter sun, we enter life on earth. Names and religion come just after date of birth. Then everybody gets a tongue to speak, and everyone hears an inner voice. A day at the end of the week to wonder and rejoice.
~P. Simon: How can you…~

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There could never be a father who loved his daughter more than I love you. Trust your intuition. It’s just like goin’ fishin’. You cast your line and hope you get a bite. But you don’t need to waste your time worrying about the marketplace, try to help the human race, struggling to survive its harshest night. I’m gonna watch you shine, gonna watch you grow. Gonna paint a sign so you’ll always know. As long as one and one is two.
~P. Simon: Father and daughter~