"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."
Lost in the popularity of Robert Frost's masterful prose are the layers of how difficult it is to choose the road less traveled. Let's unpack the traveler's mind as he stood at two roads diverged in a wood.
First, he saw an easier path vs. a harder path. They both may have been hard, but the road less traveled was certainly the harder of the two.
Next, he saw a path many had taken vs. a path few had taken. Others before him had stood at the same spot, seeing the same options, considering the same choices. Good people. Smart people. Capable people.
In that moment, he was not only choosing his path. He was calculating everyone's decisions who came before him and all who would come after him.
Consider:
- What if the majority was right and he was wrong? What if they knew something he didn't?
- Since the majority had taken one of the roads, doesn't that mean there is something more reliable down the more traveled path compared to the less traveled path?
- Is one road more traveled only because previous travelers were looking for routes well established by other ordinary travelers?
- What if he took the road less traveled and later discovered it was longer and harder than he ever imagined?
- What if it led him to other roads he didn't want to travel or to destinations he didn't want to go?
Frost understood this last point well.
He knew that this decision at the fork in the road would shape his future decisions and that he could not get this decision back once made. Not only the decision about the road but the decision in his heart.
The road less traveled vs. the road more traveled is not just a directional choice. It is a defining choice. It is as much about where your heart and mind will go as your body.
This choice will shape everything after this choice. So it is in the direction of your life, your heart, and the choices that define each of them.
The lines in Frost's poem just before the most famous verse paint the picture of the traveler realizing this and wrestling with the decision:
"Yet knowing how way leads onto way,
I doubted if I should ever come back."
There is so much journey for the traveler after this decision, but this decision alters the possibilities of those journeys.
With no way to know exactly how it would alter them.
No way to know where each would lead.
No way to know what experiences lay ahead on either road.
No way to know right from wrong in the choice.
No way to know how each road would change the traveler.
No way to know what new risks, paths, and decisions either road would present.
No way to know what destination awaits either decision or how those destinations affect the traveler's journey.
Each of us is a traveler.
Again and again, we stand at two roads diverged in a wood. Like Frost's traveler, we must make the hard decisions about the direction of our lives and the defining of hearts.
Not everything hard is great, but everything great is hard.
Answer the call. Do the work.
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