Our challenge for this month’s Blogapalooz-Hour (a ChicagoNow communal writing exercise in which we’re challenged to produce a post on an unknown topic in an hour) was: “Write about a time you followed the road less traveled and it made all the difference.”I immediately recognized the “road less traveled” reference to a Robert Frost poem. I also appreciated the additional advice given to us, “The famous Robert Frost poem idealistically wants taking the road less traveled to have been a good thing, but life doesn’t always work out, so also consider writing about a time when it didn’t work out.”A topic immediately came to mind. It’s a situation in which almost everyone on earth—or in America, at least—does one thing, and in which I will do a different thing.But before I wrote, I decided to reread the poem. I was familiar with it. Or so I thought. I’ve been interested in Robert Frost since I was a teenager, which is when I’d learned he’d written a poem for JFK’s inaugural. (I was—and sort of still am—interested in all things JFK.)However, I was surprised when I read the poem. It had changed. Or, actually, I guess, my understanding of it had changed.First of all, the poem isn’t even called The Road Less Traveled, which is what I thought it was called. It’s called The Road Not Taken. “Eh, close enough,” I thought to myself.And then I read it. And it turns out the damn poem isn’t anything I thought it was.All the times I’ve read it before, I’ve thought it was about a guy who had two choices—two possible paths to follow—and he chose the one less traveled, and because he chose the one less traveled—the implicitly less popular route—it made all the difference in his life, as compared to how things would have turned out if he had taken the other, more popular path.But that’s not what the poem says.There were two roads. He couldn’t take both. He looked down one path until it bent and he couldn’t see it anymore. He took the other path, which looked just as good, and it was grassy, but worn just the same as the first path. Both of them were equal. So he took the second and kept the first for another day. But he knew that this was a decision point, and he could never really go back and take the first path.And here’s where thing gets even more interesting. He knows that someday, when he’s at the end of the second path, the path he chose, he’ll look back and tell the story of how he made the decision, and he’ll claim that he took the path less traveled, and that it made all the difference.So really, the poem isn’t about overcoming adversity, or doing the difficult things, or making less-popular or riskier decisions based on principle. It’s about the way we shape, or frame, or mold the stories of our lives after those stories are complete.
It’s the difference between The Road Less Traveled, which implies a romantic, daring, bold decision, and The Road Not Taken, which presents the obvious idea that in every decision we make, there’s a road not taken.So this is what I’ve chosen to write a blog post about? What the hell for?We live our lives. We do what we do in the moment we’re alive, and then that moment’s gone. And all we’re left with is a story. We can tell that story any way we want to. The way we tell the story can change every time we tell it.But we can only live the story once. Frost says in the poem, “I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence:” And in that poem the sigh comes because he knows that the path wasn’t less traveled. That’s not why he took it. He took it because he had to take a path. He couldn’t stand there forever.In the situation that I mentioned earlier, it’s very clear to me that one road is less traveled. And that’s the road I will take. And taking that road will make all the difference, good or bad.No matter how things turn out though, there will always be the road not taken. But as the narrator points out, even though, “Oh, I kept it for another day!” the fact of the matter is “I doubted if I should ever come back.”So wherever this road leads, I won’t waste time wondering what might have happened if I took the other road. Because up ahead, there are, no doubt, two more roads diverging in a yellow wood.Did you like what you just read? If so, just enter your e-mail, and I'll let you know when I write something new. I promise I won't send you any crap, and you can ditch me any time you want.
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