On a Life Lived a Second Time Around
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both”. Robert Frost’s famous poem — the Road Not Taken, is something that I often think about when faced with life’s difficult choices. I try to imagine the road ahead as Frost did in his poem.
In my experience the reality of what is lived though, bears little resemblance to what unravels in our mind’s eye at these key junctures. How could we know the future anyway given the utter complexity and interconnectedness of the world around us. Human relationships, with all their nuances can change profoundly on mere gestures, no words need even be uttered. Sometimes people fall in and out of friendships, marriages, communities, and lives, because of these unspoken subtleties and never be able to figure out what really happened. Other times the path was written from the first moment, if we were able to read the signs. Most of us can’t.
Despite this we do our damnedest to control the direction of travel. Mostly our actions act as insurance policies against the randomness of the future. When we pause at these diverging roads we choose the path we believe has the most benefit for us, sometimes those around us, rarely anything…
