The morning I found the poem again
There are some things we read as children that quietly follow us into adulthood. We don’t understand them when we first encounter them. We simply memorize them, underline a few lines, perhaps write an answer about their “meaning” in an examination, and move on. Then, years later, something happens. You read the same words again, and suddenly they seem to be talking about you. I was thinking about The Road Not Taken this morning. I remembered the poem almost as I had encountered it as a child: a traveller standing in a yellow wood, looking at two roads, wondering which one to take. Back then, the poem seemed almost straightforward. Two roads. One choice. Choose one. Continue walking. But perhaps that is not what makes the poem interesting. What stayed with me today was not the road that was taken. It was the road that was not. And then came a strange question:
What if, just once, we could go back and see where the other road would have taken us? Not to change our life. Just to look.
The road we never walked
Every important decision creates a small ghost. You choose one college, and another disappears. You move to one city, and another becomes a hypothetical life. You marry one person, and there are countless people you will never know deeply enough to discover what life with them might have been. You choose one career, and somewhere in your imagination another version of you continues going to work every morning. Most of these possibilities disappear without ceremony. There is no funeral for the life you didn’t live. And yet, occasionally, it returns. Not as a fact. As a question. What if? The dangerous thing about “what if” is that it has no obligation to be realistic. The road we did not take can become anything. Perhaps it leads to success. Perhaps to love. Perhaps to failure. Perhaps to a completely ordinary life. But because we never walked it, our imagination is free to decorate it. The road we took has bills, disappointments, awkward conversations, tired mornings and consequences. The other road has none of these. It is still clean.
So I imagined going back
Imagine that one evening, years after making an important decision, you find yourself standing at the same fork in the road. Not metaphorically. Actually there. The same yellow wood. The same two paths. And somehow, impossibly, you are allowed to see the life that exists at the end of the road you didn’t take. You walk. At first, everything seems almost magical. You see another version of yourself. He has a different house. Different friends. Different memories. Different photographs. Perhaps he became the person you once imagined becoming. Perhaps he has the thing you thought you were sacrificing when you chose your present life. You watch him for a while. And then something feels strange. He is sitting alone at his kitchen table. He is worried about something. Something you cannot hear. You follow him for a day. He wakes up late. He has an argument with someone he loves. He makes a decision he regrets. He laughs at something stupid. He gets tired. He worries about the future. He wonders whether he chose correctly. And then you realise something almost absurd. He has a road he did not take too.
Every life contains an alternate life
This is perhaps the uncomfortable beauty of choice. We imagine that if we had chosen differently, uncertainty would disappear. But uncertainty doesn’t belong to a particular road. It belongs to being human. The person who chose engineering wonders what would have happened if they had studied literature. The person who became an artist wonders whether a stable corporate career would have made life easier. The person who stayed wonders what leaving would have felt like. The person who left sometimes wonders what staying would have become. We tend to compare our real life with an imaginary version of another one. That is an unfair competition. Reality is forced to show us everything. Imagination isn’t.
And perhaps Frost knew this
There is something interesting about The Road Not Taken that I didn’t notice as a child. The poem is often remembered as a celebration of choosing the unconventional path—the famous idea that the traveller took “the one less traveled by.” But the poem itself is more complicated than that. Earlier, the traveller looks at the two roads and notices that they are actually quite similar. Neither seems clearly superior. And then comes the part that I find increasingly fascinating: the traveller imagines himself, in the future, telling the story of this choice. That future version of himself will say that the choice “made all the difference.” But how much of that difference was created by the road itself? And how much was created by the story he eventually told about it? Perhaps we do something similar with our own lives. We make a choice. Then years later, we look backwards and construct a narrative around it. This was the turning point. This is why I became who I am. If I had chosen differently, everything would have changed. Maybe. But we can never know. And perhaps that uncertainty is precisely what gives our choices their weight.
What if the other road had been taken?
There is another way to read the poem. Maybe the question isn’t: “What would my life have been if I had chosen differently?” Maybe it is: “Why do I need to know?” We sometimes treat our past decisions as if somewhere there exists a perfect version of our life. The correct college. The correct person. The correct city. The correct career. The correct moment to say yes. As though one road leads to the life we were supposed to have and every other road is a mistake. But life doesn’t work like a multiple-choice examination. There is no answer key hidden at the end. A road becomes your road partly because you walk it. You don’t merely discover a life. You participate in creating it.
The childhood version of us
Maybe this is why thinking about the poem feels strangely nostalgic. As children, the future seemed like a collection of infinite possibilities. We could become astronauts, writers, scientists, cricketers, explorers, anything. Then life happened. Choices narrowed. Some dreams became impractical. Some became irrelevant. Some were replaced by better dreams. And some simply disappeared without us noticing. Growing up may partly be the process of watching possible versions of yourself gradually become impossible. That sounds sad. But perhaps it isn’t. Because choosing one life is also the act of giving one life a chance to become real. A child wants every possibility. An adult eventually has to choose.
Perhaps the real tragedy is not choosing the wrong road
We spend enormous amounts of time worrying about making the right decision. What if I choose incorrectly? What if I regret it? What if there was something better? But perhaps there is a more important question:
Once you have chosen a road, what are you going to do with it? A road doesn’t owe you a destination. You still have to walk. You still have to build relationships. You still have to recover from failures. You still have to notice the morning light occasionally. You still have to become someone worth being. Maybe the life we call “the right one” is not the life in which every decision was correct. Maybe it is simply the life in which we eventually stopped measuring every present moment against an imaginary alternative.
If I could go back
I think I would still want to visit the other road. Not because I would necessarily want to change my life. I would just like to meet the person I could have become. I would want to know what he fears. What makes him laugh. What he regrets. Who he loves. What he thinks about at three in the morning. And perhaps, after spending a day with him, I would come back. Not with an answer. With gratitude. Because maybe the purpose of imagining the road not taken is not to abandon the road we are on. Maybe it is to understand how extraordinary it is that any one of these lives became ours at all. There were thousands of possible versions of us. We became this one. And now this one is real. The other remains a story. Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps every road we don’t take deserves a little curiosity, a little mourning, and then, eventually, a quiet goodbye. Because somewhere ahead, our present road is still waiting to be walked. And unlike the other one, it has something the imaginary road never can. A tomorrow.