“We, at the height, are ready to decline. There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shadows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves Or lose our ventures.” — William Shakespeare, 1599

In the previous edition of Timeless & Timely (“The Choices We Make”), one of the timeless links was to Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”\

Timeless & Timely

The Choices We Make

“The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen.” — Charles Lamb, 1833 I had to make a difficult decision this week. Every January, the Baker Street Irregulars holds its annual dinner in New York City, bookended b…

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a year ago · 4 likes · 6 comments · Scott Monty

And I promised to follow up on that with some additional thoughts.

It’s probably his best-known poem, having inspired so many other creative outputs from others: books, commercials, episode titles for a dozen TV shows… In fact, it may be the best-known American poem of all time.

It begins:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both”

And concludes with the iconic lines:

“I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

But when making a reference to the point of this poem, most people get it wrong. Thinking about it from a different perspective can make all the difference.