The Untaken Road
What we miss when we tell the story of our lives as a series of doors we should have opened.
There is a version of you that took the other job. There is a version of you that called back. There is a version of you that stayed in the city, or left it, that married, that didn't, that wrote the book, that closed the laptop, that spoke up in the meeting, that kept quiet. Each of these versions has a life. Each of those lives, in moments when yours is hard, calls out to you in a voice that sounds suspiciously like regret.
Robert Frost's poem about the road not taken is famously misread. The two roads, he tells us plainly, 'had worn them really about the same.' The poem is not about the brave choice that made a life. It is about the story we will tell, 'ages and ages hence,' about a choice that was not really a choice at all. We will pretend it was.
Most lives are not built on grand forks in the road. They are built on a thousand small ones — most of them unnoticed, most of them roughly equivalent. The romance of the untaken road is that we get to fill it with everything our actual road lacks.
The discipline is to remember that the other road also had bills, also had bad days, also had a Tuesday morning in February. The phantom life is always sunlit because we never have to live through its rain.
Your road is the only one you can walk. The work is not to keep looking sideways at a road you cannot step onto. The work is to make this one worth the walking.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.”
Name the technique
Every story here ends on a quoted line. These entries explain how lines like it are built, credited, and misused.
- Adage
- An old, well-known saying that has acquired authority through long use.
- Commonplace Book
- A personal notebook of quotations, ideas, and passages — a tradition stretching from antiquity to today.
- Pull Quote
- A short, eye-catching quote lifted from an article and displayed in large type for emphasis.