The road not taken

path to the sea2, originally uploaded by mattfreer.

Being awoken by a baby early in the morning can have its benefits… one such benefit was discovering Radio 4’s Something Understood programme last year. Each week it looks at “some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry.” We are rarely now up at 6am on a Sunday, but with the wonders of the BBC iPlayer I always try and listen.

This weeks programme looked at Mysticism and Resistance, with a focus on how our lives respond to and set off on paths we discover along the way, which often involve difficult choices. I particularly liked the poem quoted this week, The road not taken by Robert Frost… At a time when I am looking out for a new path to take, in terms of jobs (I’ve yet to mention it on my blog, but my role at CMS was made redundant last year and so I am leaving CMS in two weeks time), it is particularly poignant:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, 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.

Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970
by Leslie Frost Ballantine.