The Road Less Traveled

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.

This is from Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, and much has been written about the last three lines. The road less traveled is supposed to represent individualism, the person who marches to the beat of a distant drum, as opposed to the cadence of conformity. People who follow their own path in this manner are admired as adventurers, discoverers, and trailblazers. Such people founded this country, and such people made this country what it is today. Well, what it would be if we weren't so busy conforming to our nonconformity. It's no fun being a individual unless everyone else is doing the same thing, I guess.

Robert Frost got lucky in his choice of paths. But what if there's a reason a road is less traveled? What if the road less traveled is a weedy, overgrown dead end that drops off a cliff? What if the road less traveled leads to a cave full of angry rattlesnakes who are in a bitey-kind of mood? What if the road less traveled is actually an endless loop? Sometimes it may be good to stay on the well-traveled path! Or not--the well-worn path can also be the road paved with good intentions, as most of our mothers warned us. But this leaves us back at those diverging roads.

Ozzy Osbourne, who occasionally is wise, sang that "The road to nowhere leads to me." Perhaps the road that seems to go nowhere, the one that leads us to ourselves and who we were meant to be, is the road less traveled. Maybe that would make all the difference.