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On Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken, by my friend
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For the sake of privacy protection, I have deleted those sentences which are personal enough to leak the author's information.
The original post:
elf there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. He was hard on himself that way."
That completely made life so much better to hear that. Although I'm sure that whoever decides on the curriculum for American Lit in this country would disagree on this, I really think that when you cover satire in your American Lit. classes from now on, you should tell them this story. It really makes life so much nicer, in a strange, small way. My roommate is reading Socrates (Plato) right now, and she hates it. I don't blame her. Reading Socrates is like sticking your head in a pot of boiling water, and then transferring it to the Potomac. In essence, it is painful. So I told her to read it as satire, and that has made all the difference ; )
My mom asked me if I felt it was better satirically because it really says that you have to make choices and that is the way it is. I said that people always make huge deals about what "the right" decision is in a given situation (not necessarily when it comes to ethics, but just situations where you have to made a decision) ... And, for instance, my decision to ... Those were two decisions that could both be great, and they would probably bring me to two very different places in my life. My calling may have even changed, .... But we can't dwell on one decision as the one that "makes all the difference," because we can't know that. In either case our lives go on. And, unlike literal roads, the other decision doesn't exist once we have chosen a road. Because time is linear, any "going back" would actually still be going forward. And this is why I am glad I ... Because it has helped me to think about things like this o.O
Paths cannot be compared. They are just so different. And you cannot see all the consequences of your decisions- even the decision that you made. Because our decisions have such a huge influence on so many different things that I don't think any one decision can be considered to have more of an impact than others. I mean some will obviously be remembered, like Obama becoming president ... But there were so many tiny little decisions made that led up to the large decisions.
BTW,
I have been taught to live in the present, and to not always live for the future, but to be content where I am. I know this is an important lesson for myself, because so often I sit and think about what the future could be like, when all along I am moving along toward that future, without efforts to live through the present. It's like when you are so excited for the weekend, that you forget to live through the week.Reply from one of her friends:
Yeah, I like that explanation of the poem better, I think. That we shouldn't agonize over our decisions and search for "the one right answer" because we will never find it - there is a choice between two good paths, with possibly two completely different endings. But both will lead to a good adventure, ... and we must listen for that. But I agree that it is a bad idea to look back at our life choices and waste our time wondering what our lives would be had we chosen the other path. I mean, it's interesting to speculate a little, but there's a fine line between healthy curiosity and wasting one's time wondering about the past.
Reply from another friend:
I could not agree with you more on that, you never know what the road not taken would have been like. You never know which road would have made more difference, because you simply cannot compare.
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