About those two roads...........................

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

David Orr points out that the standard reading of that poem – about choosing the "road less travelled", spurning convention and doing something extraordinary with your life – is repeatedly undermined by the poem itself. For one thing, the speaker admits that the two roads in question look equally well-travelled, really. For another thing, how could he possibly know that the path he chose "has made all the difference," since he never got to try the other one?

A sly alternative reading of the poem is that this is exactly the point. We constantly have to make such choices; there's often not much to choose between them; and we can never really be sure we made the right ones. Even so, we have to choose. Making a choice – sometimes virtually any choice at all – is what gets you on your way. If the speaker in "The Road Not Taken" hadn't made some choice, he'd still be standing at that fork in the path, frozen in ambivalence, waiting for something to happen.

-Oliver Burkeman

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