kartooner

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.