The Road Not Taken

The Illusion of Choice and the Stories we Tell Ourselves

I started thinking about Robert Frost this morning before 7am.

It’s funny how your mind works when you're just out walking. I hadn’t thought about his poem, The Road Not Taken, in probably twenty-five years. In grade nine, my English teacher made us stand in front of the class, hold this random yellow rock, and recite it. He wanted us to be really theatrical with it. At fourteen, I didn't care, I didn't get it, and honestly, I thought the whole thing was pretty stupid.

But as you get older, things change. You’ll hear an old song lyric or remember something a teacher made you read, and it suddenly clicks. You see how it actually fits into real life.

My walk this morning takes me along the normal trail that everyone uses—the main path where people take their ATVs, walk their dogs, or ride horses. But as I was walking, I kept noticing all these little offshoot roads cutting into the trees. They probably just lead to someone's private land, but looking at them made me think of Frost’s two roads splitting in the woods.

Everyone knows the cliché version of that poem. People think it’s just a about a person taking the path nobody else walks. But looking at those paths this morning, I realized it's simpler and a bit heavier than that. It’s just about choices.

I’ve always been someone who took the weird offshoot roads in life. I didn't stick to the main highway where everyone else was going. It hasn't been a straight, easy line. There have been plenty of ups and downs, and moments where I wondered what on earth I was doing. But for the most part, it worked out.

Walking on that path, watching the light coming through the trees, I started thinking about the other side of it, too—the thoughts that creep in when you're alone. It is so easy to look back at the choices you didn't make and build them up into something perfect. We romanticize the jobs we didn't take, the places we didn't move to, or the safe opportunities we passed up. We imagine those alternate lives as flawless, completely forgetting that those roads would have had mud, potholes, and steep hills, too.

Frost actually wrote about that. At the very end of the poem, he says he will tell the story later in life "with a sigh." He knew that whatever path we choose, we will always look back and wonder about the other one. It's just human nature to wonder what if.

But the real point of all this, the thing that hit me while I was talking into my phone's voice notes this morning, is that you can't let the fear of the unknown keep you stuck on the main highway.

Don't be afraid to take a risk on one of those smaller paths. Sometimes they work out, and sometimes they don't. If they do, they can lead you to something incredible that you never could have planned from the main trail. And if they don't? Well, on the flip side, at least you tried. You didn't just spend your whole life walking the exact same path as everyone else just because it was the easy thing to do.