The Road Not Taken
“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 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.
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