I have a poster on the wall of my office, quoting Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Road not Taken. This happens to be one of my all time favorite poems.
I often wonder where the points in my life are that I should have chosen to take the other road, and which road was it? More traveled and well-known, or more risky and, possibly, fulfilling in the end?
I know what everyone says about risks. “Playing it safe” in life will doom a man to simplicity and boredom.
I feel as though I take risks often enough to keep from playing it safe, while still giving myself a chance at success, which is a good “middle of the rule” philosophy, in my opinion. The old axiom of picking your battles is one my tenets and I try to pick battles that I have a reasonable chance of success at. In other words, I have not yet found a battle that I had to join that I knew, from the start, that I would fail.
Everyone has their breaking point, at which the futility of a situation creeps in and suddenly makes that particular battle no longer worth fighting. When are the odds stacked too high? When is it a time to walk away, lick your wounds, and live to fight another day? Or perhaps, in the holistic viewpoint, could even failure make it worth it? Ultimately, on those diverging roads in the yellow wood, where do we go from here?
I try not to regret any road I’ve taken. I make my apologies, I learn from my mistakes, and I move on. The only thing I can hope for when I fail is to be able to pick up the pieces and keep on moving.
It’s snowing outside as I write this, covering up the tracks I leave behind me as “way leads on to way,” hiding some of the poor decisions I’ve made on which road to travel. Some mistakes are without much consequence, and are easily learned from and cast aside. Others show up as glaring and obvious errors later on when we realize we’re lost on the trail, and must cut through the raw forest to make our own, new path.
In the end, for all those turns that I’ve made that force me to blaze my own trail, I will not soon forget.
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