About choices

When I started this series, I knew at some point I would get to The Road Not Taken.

I have not studied American poetry growing up, so I was very unfamiliar with Robert Frost work or life story (until I read the Wikipedia entry which obviously makes me now an expert). Therefore I will be avoiding contextualization and keep to the written words.

The main theme is obviously choice: the fork in the road is the most commonly used metaphor for the topic. What is really interesting are the feelings expressed and latent about that particular choice.

Those feelings are the theme of many a business book. Obviously, it is the privilege of a poet to present it in a personal and abstract way that is more powerful than a 200 page management book.

The poem touches upon many aspects of decision that you would find in management books:

1. It is lonely
2. It is latent in the writing... I find the first person account of a fork in the middle of a forest one of the most powerful evocation of loneliness I know in poetry. Some of Hugo's writing point to the "loneliness at the top", and most romantics use loneliness of a lover as a recurring theme.
3. This image however goes back to childhood memories of the Red Riding Hood: primal fears
4. It has to be made with incomplete information
5. The poet goes out of its way to muddy the picture here. We are getting as confused as he is. This is where the Analysis Paralysis sets in
7. The only way to make it non-paralyzing is to persuade yourself to move forward
8. Boom! Black on white right there on the screen! If you bing for how to deal with this problem (yes, I bing for stuff), you will find many advice. Some are good, some are ok, some are out-of-this-world out of touch... But the best ones sum up to : acknowledge that you are afraid of losing something and move on.
9. In this case, Frost persuades himself it is not lost forever, but he is enough in touch with his feelings to know that he is kidding himself
11. We are prone to post rationalization, even though, years down the road, there is no way to tell wether the choice was the right one
12. Yup, not point in paraphrasing the last strophe, is there?

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.

#businessandpoetry