The Road Not Taken

How we talk about our choices

A Woodland Road with Travelers by Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1607 (public domain - Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“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.”

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 on…