Taking the Road …not taken

I think for most of my life I’ve called this poem, “Two Roads Diverged in a Wood” I didn’t even get the first line right, never mind the title but I suspect that only matters if someone else tried to look it up, though Google will get you there even if you’re only close.   Choice, both as an opportunity and actually making a choice, has long been the point of the poem in my life.  There is regret in not being able to do everything.  Not necessarily in the choices we make, but in the fact that we can’t do it all right away.  Right now.  That reality doesn’t mean we can never, but then again as Frost suggests, “knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back” it does present a consequence that closes off one path with the taking of another.  A sense of loss swallowed up in the prospects of the possibilities and outcomes you do have as a result of the choices you make. 

In the end, to see, perhaps that should read seize, the road, to walk it, and live your life as it comes is the key.  Learning along the way, sharing with no regrets, seeking to draw from the interactions with the land, the people, the ways, to live deep as Thoreau suggested that seems to be the key.  I would suggest that it’s critical that we find opportunities to share what you learned on your road and thrill in the stories others learned on their path.  Not a bad way to spend a moment or two. 

So the poem is here…take a read, it’s unlikely it’s the first time but ok if that’s so.

DevinSupertramp, the youtube artist and filmmaker, has put the poem to a bit of a video tour of Ireland narrated in part by this classic poem – I’ve included the link to his video below, I think it’s rather spectacular.

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.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENuhNRe7b1s&t=74s