Paths

Which path do you take? Do you take the safe path? Or do you venture onto the uncertain path? What decision do you make when you so obviously know a choice must be made but yet the point of decision is unclear?  If I had the answers to those questions, I would write a book, appear on Oprah and become the next best thing. Truth be told, sometimes it is far wiser to take the path more traveled and sure. I know that Frost might disagree but when the future is truly uncertain, the tried and true can often be the safe bet. Other times, when the tried and true has failed, that other path, the one full of uncertainty, could be the correct path. Sometimes, what you thought you would do, changes completely when you reach the point of decision that was once obscured.

In life, there are no simple answers to the difficult questions that pass our way. Who is to say which way is correct. It is only after the choice has been made that an answer forms and yet, even if you had taken the other path, you would always wonder if you should have taken the other. Perhaps it has become our nature to always doubt our decisions, to wander aimlessly in search of some unknowable answer.  Not finding that answer, we fill our lives with things we think are the answer. Still, something along our path is missing.

My theory lends itself toward a lack of spirituality and connection. We hurry through our day, impatient when the person in front of us at the grocery store questions a price, impatient when the traffic light turns red, impatient to be somewhere else. Funny, when we get to that somewhere else, how often we immediately start planning the next somewhere else? We rarely stop to talk to the person in front of us at the grocery store, let alone offer to help. We avert our eyes, browse our email on our cell phones or even continue talking on our phones when we should be interacting with the people around us.

When I speak of a spiritual connection, I don't mean religion. There are just as many church-going, religious people who are wandering aimlessly. And as my mind has begun to wander, I'll end this with Frost.

1. 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;
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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,
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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.
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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.
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*Now playing: Blowin' In the Wind by Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan