How ‘The Road Not Taken’ Encourages Me to Stop Agonizing

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is considered one of the most inspirational poems of all time, with the final three lines often cited on everywhere:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

It is considered an assertion of independence and individual choice and agency, but reading the rest of the poem makes it a lot more complicated. I learned as much in my college English class solely focused on Robert Frost’s poems and in an independent study where I wrote a hundred-something-page project detailing my personal connection to many of those poems, including “The Lesson For Today,” a longer Frost poem which was read at my wedding ceremony and may have put half the audience to sleep.

In the “The Road Not Taken,” the narrator sees two roads diverged in a yellow wood. The narrator is “sorry I could not travel both” and says that one road was “just as fair” as the other and that both roads “had worn them really about the same.” The narrator agonizes over which road to take, saying “I kept the first for another day!”

The narrator says the final three lines “telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence,” so in reality, there is no tangible difference between the two roads. However, the narrator’s agonizing makes him hesitant to make a decision at all.

In fact, Frost wrote the poem for his English friend, Edward Thomas. who was known for his indecision, particularly during World War I, when Thomas agonized over whether to enlist to fight in World War I or not.

Frost wrote the poem for Thomas to guide him and almost as a chiding joke. Frost once told Thomas, “no matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.”

But Thomas was incensed at the poem, seeing it as a huge insult to his indecisiveness and as a coward who lacked direction. Soon after, Thomas decided to enlist in the war, and the poem may have not been the biggest catalyst, but his relationship with Frost and their writings to each other played a major role in his fateful, life-changing decision: Thomas died shortly after enlisting in the Battle of Arras on Easter, 1917, according to Matthew Hollis at The Guardian.

Frost in later years said, “you have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem — very tricky.” Ultimately, I and my class interpreted the poem to mean something very different from its popular meaning.

“The Road Not Taken” is a message to just make a decision, any decision, when at a crossroads. It’s not that the decision won’t matter, but agonizing over it is not helpful, and neither is valorizing it afterward.

Real life can be a lot more complicated than the poem’s setting, as not every two roads are worn “just the same” or there may not be two roads, but five or six roads. Sometimes, the decision can seem quite more consequential: what job to take, who to marry, whether to go to college or pursue a trade or go into the military after high school.

The message is, though, to go through with to make a decision and not look back, because it is impossible to see how life would have turned out if you had taken one road over the other.

Personally, I have tried to live more and more in accordance with Robert Frost’s true message in “The Road Not Taken.” In recent years, people have joked about my lack of preferences.

When I’m asked what I want to do in a given social situation or when going to a restaurant, my default answer is “I’m down for whatever.” For non-English speakers, it’s an expression that means you are okay with doing anything or that you have no preference and will go along with anything another person or group wants to do.

For me, it’s a genuine answer. Often times, I do have no preferences for certain decisions that are very important to other people, like where to eat. This comes into play in my personal life as well: I will just eat what’s available in the fridge or a restaurant that’s closer to the house rather than one I have to go out of my way for.

Outside of meals, this expression comes up in almost any social setting to any activity. If everyone else wants to go hiking, I’ll go hiking. If everyone else wants to camp, I’ll camp. If everyone else wants to sit inside and play video games, I’ll do so as well in a social setting.

There can certainly be a people-pleasing aspect to being “down for whatever”. I know and understand this, but I would rather be around a lot more “down for whatever” people instead of incredibly picky people.

Last year, however, I was on a vacation where it drove me crazy that everyone couldn’t get along and agree on something as simple as where they wanted to eat. Some people wanted to eat Asian food, while others wanted pizza and wings, to the point where the group struggled for hours in the morning to make a decision at all of what kind of food to eat. This is not the type of decision that is inherently consequential to me, so I was truly wondering what the problem was since any decision would be better than no decision.

I am inherently a person who does not plan a lot in my personal life. At work, it’s different and there is a need to be very organized, but on a personal level, I tend to live on impulse a lot more. I tend to just go with the flow in all aspects with the life. Daily decisions like when to go on my run, whether to study for law school or do housework in the next 20 minutes, are all “go with the flow” type of decisions. I do what I feel like or whatever feels most necessary or urgent in the moment. Spending money, however, tends to be a more agonizing type of decision where I more cautiously weigh the pros and cons.

When I’m in a group of people, sometimes it gets more complicated, particularly when people have different preferences. Being down for whatever is perpetually just the easier way. It is a form of having decision fatigue and needing to make the least amount of decisions as possible. My wife sometimes gets frustrated with me because I will leave a lot of the decisions to her, mainly out of not wanting to make a decision that she might not like.

During our winter break, my wife and I decided to vacation in Sedona, Arizona. We used someone else’s vacation package and simply wanted to find somewhere that was warm and available, so we were barely paying for the hotel. This was one of the suggested options and it is a great one: we have seen the Grand Canyon, and visited several sights in Page, Arizona, like Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend. We have gone on several hikes, and plan to visit a local arts center, and plan to do even more hikes before we leave. We plan on seeing several attractions in Phoenix since we fly back home from the airport there too. Individually, I have gone on several runs through different routes to explore Sedona’s roads and trails, and one on the treadmill when I had to do it super early in the morning.

But, of course, there is always the tendency to wish you did more and wish you did something different. There are some times during this vacation that I wish we had seen other sights. There are times I wish we didn’t spend as much money. I wish at some point that I went to run at Flagstaff, America’s mecca of running. I’m sure my wife wishes we ate at a different restaurant, and honestly, there are times I wish we stayed in the room and just chilled more often instead of the hustle and bustle of being outside, driving, and hiking the entire time.

I am sure I will look back on this trip and think of other things that could have been done or ways it could have been more relaxing. On a similar note, sometimes I agonize over which Netflix show to watch and spend too much time scrolling on the home screen. Sometimes I will wake up and agonize over whether to wake up and get active or keep scrolling social media on my phone. But looking back obviously is not going to change any of that.

This vacation and group decisions are a snapshot of greater, more consequential life events. It can be whether to spend a certain holiday with my wife’s family or my own family. It can be the decision we’re trying to make about whether to have a dog or not or when we want to have kids.

On an individual level, I will be an attorney next year and will receive my J.D. in May. I have one semester to go and hopefully can finish strong, but I don’t have a legal job lined up after law school. What to do after law school is an incredibly consequential decision. I could stay in my current job in special education, or I could become a military lawyer, work at a law firm, work for the government, or do a judicial clerkship. All of these jobs have different pros and cons, and I have to be selective and not just take the first one offered to me. Ultimately, I will have to make a decision and not just weigh several offers endlessly.

“What decision should I make?” can come up in a lot of big and small decisions. And I don’t do this as much as I used to, but I often think back on mistakes I made and things I could have done differently. I think about how much of my life could have opened up if I didn’t devote so much time and energy to being a long-distance runner, doing cross country and track in high school and college and also running marathons now. Could I have been more academically accomplished? Could I have taken clubs like the school newspaper more seriously? Could I have made other friends outside the cliques of runners I knew?

It’s not that it does not matter that I became a runner, but the reality is there is nothing I can do to change it now. I, time and time again, chose to commit so much of myself to running. I did it more for my team in high school and college, and I do it more for myself now. There is no turning back the clock and I still commit myself now.

I also used to agonize a lot more, particularly in a period of darkness in my life when I suffered through a very understandable depression in relation to my life circumstances. I agonized over whether to go outside or stay in all day. I agonized, in my last year of college, about which people I should stay friends with or which connections I should let fade away.

I know that, with Robert Frost’s guidance, the very worst thing I can do is sit in a room for hours, days, weeks, just agonizing at a crossroads over what path to take. Sometimes it is necessary to be cautious and prudent, but being too cautious can lead to the agonizing indecisiveness I was previously susceptible to.

I don’t know how I stopped agonizing as much — it kind of just happened over time. There is always a way I rationalize and we all do to make our decisions and paths seem more unique and special, but I have learned that it’s better to swing, miss, and make the wrong decision than to sit at the crossroads, conflicted and indecisive.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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