I've taken the road less traveled
and now I don't know where the hell I am.
My daughter found this on a card today in our favorite art store and showed it to me. I snorted and she giggled. We both imagined Robert Frost and his famous horse in the woods, turning around and around again, completely lost:
“What the hell? Didn’t we just pass that rock a few minutes ago?”
And then it was time for lunch and errands and dog walking. We both moved on with the day.
Only, this little joke burrowed into me, hiding under layers of to-do lists and laundry and emails until I was lying in bed. Then it pounced. It’s not nearly as funny when it’s midnight and you are staring at the ceiling, feeling completely unmoored.
When I was a kid, I was taught first A, then B. Degree, marriage, condo, another degree, tenured job, fixed rate mortgage, fully fenced yard, kid. And of course, always take the well-marked trail or you’ll end up with a bad case of poison ivy.
Turns out, you can do everything right and still feel like things are wrong. So we tried going B to A. We moved to a place thousands of miles away where we didn’t know anyone. We quit stable jobs without new jobs lined up. We sold a house without knowing if we would ever find such a low mortgage rate again (probably not). We started spending instead of saving. We got a dog before we had a yard. Then we got another dog, still without a yard.
Choosing any path is hard. Choosing the less traveled path harder still. And perhaps we are missing the point entirely by focusing on which path is best. Frost apparently said as much:
"You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem—very tricky."
Maybe it doesn’t matter what path you chose but how you walk it. Do you notice the way the sun filters through the paper birch trees? The cluster of wild irises? The deer watching you from the shadows? Or are you too busy regretting the unchosen path? We humans are good at finding meaning and most likely, at the end of the day, we can tell a good or a bad story about any path.
Around 2 am I decided that I’m going to sit with the discomfort of not knowing where the hell I am. I tell myself that I can always just follow the dog. She strays far off the beaten path, yet never fails to find her way back to what matters: her pack, a warm bed, and a fully stocked kitchen.
