This post is a continuation of In Arrested Development, a series of posts in which I reflect and analyze myself to make myself a better human being. If you aren’t interested in such things, here is your warning to move along.

Photo by claytron used under Creative Commons License.

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.

From Mountain Interval, a 1916 poetry collection written by Robert Frost.

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In this twisted tale of my life, there are two forks. Each leads into it’s own direction reflecting different aspects of my life, history and of my personality. The first set is a direct reference to In Arrested Development. Depending on where you are, the view of the fork is different and it means different things.

Is the road less traveled moving out because everyone here stays home? Or is it staying home because a majority of the country does that? What about the world? People in Spain don’t move out till around 30 and most Mexican adults don’t move out till they are married. Which perspective am I?

From my point of view I failed to take the road less traveled by rationalizing it as the right thing to do. Instead of doing what I promised to do, I chose not to move out thinking that it would help out financially. If I could stay home I could save more. I convinced myself it was the right thing to do, not realizing the consequences later. By not taking the steps that I needed to, I failed to declare my independence and personal freedom. Instead I let myself be manipulated, not once questioning the motives of those who I trusted. I took the road most traveled here and that made all the difference to ending things.

But the metaphor extends to just more than choosing to move in or out. Life is but a series of forks. I could have at any time before, dedicated myself to my degree and been out, negating this last fork. I could have chosen to educate myself on matters not taught to me growing up and prevented my uneducated self from acts of stupidity. Just like the metaphor, the road and forks are endless, always leaving you wondering and sighing about what could have been.

Once you take a road, there is no turning back. Although I will change paths later on, the past cannot be changed. I can’t fix my past faults to make things better right now. I made a choice that was extremely important, and I can not emphasize this enough. I failed to consider something so important. I will never know what that other path would be like, so I sigh and I will regret for the rest of my life. It wasn’t worth it. I know now that I did not make the right choice. You can interpret it by knowing that either I did exercise my personal freedom and independence and chose to trust those who would lead me astray from what I wanted, or that wasn’t able to exercise my personal freedom and independence because I was manipulated by those I entrusted.

I hope that once I do get further upon the path, I can look back and see this with an ironic eye. Maybe it is better that I subconsciously took this path, for without the trials and growth I am going through right now, it would have ended anyways. The other path that I did not take may have lead to yet another fork that ends up in a black hole of emotional suck, collapsing the other into a husk ending things anyways. I will never know, but I suspect it so. While earlier on it looked like one was better than the other, it wasn’t so clear that both paths may have been equally worn and equally covered in leaves. Time and memory shows that I can only remember one road less traveled by.

This poem has stuck with me since I was in middle school circa 1997. Never has it been such an apt description of my state of mind. When I get to the next fork, I know which way I want to head. Actually, I know less about the direction and more about the goal. I have no uncertainties that I will once again take the wrong road, after all to err is to be human. But I have to try. I have to try to make anew, even if it isn’t what I thought. Hope of a better tomorrow has given me motivation of the many things I am doing to improve. We see this. We recognize it.

And that has made all the difference.