I have a tendency to transverse my memory logs — as deep and vast as they are — for specific moments that led me to where I am now.
If I were a superhero this would be my greatest weakness; too much looking back, not enough looking forward. I suppose it has to do with the way I’ve engineered myself.
Exploring who it is that I was and continue to be, as a father, husband and artist comforts the person that I’ve become.
Just as there is no secret sauce to success, there too is no algorithm to knowing what choice we made (or will make) is the right one. Instead we lean on our past and entrust ourselves to influence future decisions and hope the best for the penultimate outcome.
Robert Frost, four-time Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, put it best in his poem,
The Road Not Taken
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
We’ve all stood before the fork in the road of our choices. Just as the person Frost describes above we chose one path over another and promise ourselves that if we ever face a similar set of choices again, we might consider the other path.
Yet, it is highly unlikely we will face the same situation, so we accept that whatever we did may or may not have had an outcome we were proud of and we move on.
I can’t say that every decision I’ve made has been the right one, in fact I’d be living in a delusional world if I believed that were true.
However, I know for a fact that many of them, right or wrong, shaped the person I am today and recognizing the journey to that fork in the road is probably just as important as the decision itself.
The difficulty for me is figuring out why I decided to take one path over another which ends up being an exercise fueled with curiosity and sometimes lends itself to insanity.