THE ROAD TAKEN

This reflection began as a conversation with an old friend. As our conversations do, we wandered here and there and eventually into Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” the poem that begins famously:

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 . . .
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

If you’ve not looked at it for a while, you may remember the poem as “The Road Less Traveled” rather than by the title Frost gave it, “The Road Not Taken.” The road less traveled is what the poem has come to signify. Along with the Frost of the poem, we stand in our own yellow wood, looking first one way and then the other, and seeing that one of the paths seems “less traveled by,” we imagine ourselves stepping out boldly in that direction, not wanting to go with the herd. We frame it in Sinatra’s terms, not Frost’s: “I did it my way.” Scott Peck, without ever directly quoting the poem, sold seven million books under the title, The Road Less Traveled (1978). His point was that “the road less traveled” takes discipline. It’s a hard hike. But none of that is Frost.

In fact, the poem is wistful, a lament for what has been lost. It’s “The Road Not Taken,” the road in retrospect you might have taken but now it’s too late. You can’t go back. “I shall be telling this with a sigh,” the last verse begins, “Somewhere ages and ages hence,” Those of us of a certain age get this: who of us would not like to go back, and try the other path—the one not taken—just to see where it might lead?

Having thought a bit about Frost’s poem and path metaphors, what occurred to me and perhaps to you is that the fork in the yellow wood is not the way these choices usually go. In a recent sermon, our curate at St Paul’s, Bellingham, Rev. Mckenzi Roberson, proposed another metaphor. Her path was not in the yellow wood but on the slopes of Mt. Baker, the majestic snow peak that rules our skyline in this part of the Pacific Northwest. She took a trail from Artist’s Point, a jumping off place for several trails of varying difficulty. She soon discovered one of the perils of hiking in this area. You go along thinking that you are on the right path only to have the trail suddenly peter out. Or, having embarked on what you thought was an easy trail, find yourself stepping off into steeper and more rugged terrain than you had bargained for. Somewhere back down the trail, you missed a turn. You missed it because others before you missed it, and they made the path you are following. One wrong turn leads to another.

A wonderful metaphor, when you think about it. How many choices we make are false trails? Well-trodden dead ends? People keep making the same mistake, and every time they make it, they tramp down the shrubbery so that the next people think that this is the way the trail leads. But sooner or later you discover that the trail leads nowhere. If you plunge ahead, you will find yourself in a familiar wilderness. You have to go back, carefully scanning the landscape to see where you went wrong. Few have the patience for it. Instead, we plunge ahead.

So perhaps the yellow wood—or the trails on Mt Baker or wherever you live—are more complicated than Frost has it. He stands in the yellow wood and sees two equal paths leading one way and the other: “And both that morning equally lay.” But we are not usually presented with such a choice.

Sometimes there seems to be no choice at all. The path simply gives out. In front of you, a sheer cliff rises up. And when you turn, behind you there seems to be no way back. You’re trapped. You stop, unable to move. A spouse dies. A job is lost. You suffer a financial reversal. And there you are, with no path forward.

Or perhaps you’ve come to a place in the yellow wood and discovered that there are six paths leading off in different directions. As you peer down each of them, you find that they branch again. Not two choices, but choices upon choices. Once in Paris, looking for a specific street, we came to just such a place, a roundabout with roads leading off in every direction and then branching again a block or so away. This was pre satellite navigation. Round and round we went trying to read the street signs with little success. And whenever we did choose, we soon found ourselves where we did not want to be. With great difficulty,  we would find our way back to the roundabout from hell and start choosing again. We were soon closer to losing our marriage than to finding the right street. Isn’t life more often like that Paris roundabout than two serene paths diverging in a yellow wood? 

Or—this seems to me the greater truth—life is not choosing at all but being chosen. In the yellow wood, it’s often not we who choose the path; it’s the path that chooses us. This has been true for me. If I had a yellow wood moment, it was after I left Ann Arbor, where I did graduate studies. Down one path was academia; down the other was the pastorate. I don’t remember choosing so much as being chosen. The path I followed—perhaps it was the more traveled of the two—soon offered me subtle confirmations: it seemed to say you are on the right path. Come this way, it beckoned, and so I came until, like Frost in the poem, I could only think back to the road not taken, wondering what might have been.

The point, perhaps, is not the path so much as how we walk it. Whether we face a difficult choice or too many choices or no choice at all, whether the path forward seems right or wrong, the wisdom of life is learning how to walk the path we are on, often on difficult terrain.

Or perhaps it’s not so much how we walk it, as whom we walk it with. Some of us have been lucky in this regard, if an old Calvinist can speak of luck. For more than 60 years I have walked it with my Adria, and, to quote the last line of Frost’s poem, “that has made all the difference.”

Clay

Here is Frost’s poem in its entirety:

The Road Not Taken

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.

Robert Frost, 1915