Everyone’s heard the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken. [1] Often people mistakenly focus on the notion of the path taken being the less traveled route, not the one that others take, or in other words, they see this as being primarily about marching to the beat of your own drummer, doing your own thing. The poem is really much more basic than that, exploring the feelings we all have whenever we are faced with two very similar choices that will take us in different yet unforeseen directions.
We’ve all been at this cross-roads before. We have two alternatives, and either one will take us to a place where we can’t simply retrace our steps and do it over. These are usually big life decisions such as where to go to college, whether to go on a mission or not, what to major in, whom to marry, what jobs to take (or reject), how many kids to have and where to live. For example, if I go back in time to my high school years, my life would be very different if I had gone to Millersville University, Franklin & Marshall, or Penn State with my friends rather than going clear across the country to BYU. That decision was early enough in my life that it would have changed many things that followed. I would have had different friends. I probably would not have gone on a mission. I would never have met my current husband. I may have been my same self in many ways, but I would not have lived the same life and had the same experiences. On the other hand, I would have had different professors who would influence me in whatever ways they would have. I would have reacted to my friends and fellow students in whatever ways I would have. I would have met someone else I would have married. We can’t know what life would have been like on the other path. It’s too late for do-overs, even if we wanted them, and there are too many moving parts to predict outcomes, as Marty McFly learns in Back to the Future.
In science fiction, we refer to the idea that our choices can take us to such different places as the multiverse, or the hypothesis that all possible iterations of existence co-exist in parallel or alternate universes. You can read more about the multiverse concept and its supporters and detractors, here. Or just watch Star Trek TOS: Mirror, Mirror which is much more entertaining.
While we reflect on what might have been, we usually focus on those big life decisions, but we often forget that those larger decisions came about due to smaller decisions that seem unrelated. Our lives also changed course due to the various actions and inactions of others. When I was house-building in Cambodia, I couldn’t help but wonder what about me would be the same and what would be different if I had been born and raised in a rural Cambodian village. Would I be the same type of person in terms of personality without the environment I was raised in and that I was exposed to in my formative years and beyond? What if I were illiterate? What if I struggled daily to survive or lived in a war-torn environment? What if my family had been abusive? These are the types of things that are outside of our control, that we take for granted in assessing who we are now, and yet the environment and opportunities we have weren’t our own creation or achievement. We are in part a byproduct of experiences crafted by the decisions of others.
Lastly, what about indecision? How much of our lives are lived as a twig in a stream, being carried in the current of status quo? At any moment, we could radically alter the course of our lives, but we generally don’t. Our lives have a certain course they are running at a given moment. Course corrections are usually minor, not life-changing.
There’s a real human tendency to hold the line when it comes to decisions we’ve made. We instantly seek to justify to ourselves the choices we’ve made. We look back on jobs we left as though we graduated from them. Leaving a spouse seems like our eyes were finally opened. Moving from one house to another makes the flaws of the first house stand out. Our current decision instantly changes the memory of what once was. And yet, self-justification is just a human trait that makes it easier for us to live with change.
This isn’t the same as having regrets. Regrets are when we feel nostalgia for a past event that could have led to a different present. Regrets can also be when we feel we made a wrong choice, or we didn’t take a risk that we wish we had. Regrets seem like a time waster, to me, an indulgence. But a twinge of regret may help us do something better next time.
“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.” Arthur Miller
When you look back on your life decisions, do you regret anything? Do you wonder what would have been?
Discuss.
[1] If you haven’t, then read this aloud.
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN by Robert Frost
There is a lot there.
I’ve decided that fate plays a large role in my life. I’m not a Calvinist, but I do ascribe the circumstances of my birth, goodly parents, first-world upbringing, lack of abuse, etc. to the hand of God. I figure its a necessary backdrop to the lessons I need to learn in this stage of my existence.
Otherwise, when I compare my bounty to the poverty-stricken children of war in, say, Rwanda (or the south Bronx) I cannot see the justice of God. To paraphrase Cecil Rhodes, “To be born an American in the 20th Century is to have won the cosmic lottery.”
I took the one less traveled by… And now I have miles to go before I sleep…
“Moving from one house to another makes the flaws of the first house stand out.”
Really? Moving home has always had the opposite effect on me. Accordingly it takes me a long time to appreciate the benefits of the new home. It can be quite traumatic.
I’m writing this comment while avoiding finishing up my grad school application. I’m applying to grad school about 9 years later than I had planned.I definitely have some regrets, but anytime I go down the rabbit hole of what ifs I conclude that it is more likely my life would be worse off than better off (considering I am quite happy with my life) had I done things differently.
I don’t believe in the multiverse theory, because that would mean that in some universe God is not God. Trouble is, without the idea of a multiverse people tend to get fatalistic about determinism. I don’t believe that knowing the outcome of a choice invalidates the freedom to make that choice.
For regrets, I have a good number. I can imagine many different ways my life “might have gone” if a different choice had been made. I wonder how much this ties into the hardest type of forgiveness; forgiving yourself.
I think the multiverse is useful as a thought experiment. Hermann Hesse uses something similar at the end of Steppenwolf, The Magic Theatre, where you open doors on all the lives that might have been.
What Hesse discovers is that all these doors are true aspects of the real you. Our identity is the sum total not only of the decisions we make in this life, but all the decisions we might have made in an unlimited number of other possible circumstances.
I think there is something to this. Our own lives are guided and dictated by so many arbitrary factors over which we have no control. Yet we still think of this life as “us.” But how can that really be “us?” How can we know the true “us” until after we have been tested by all possible circumstances? Until that happens, I think we have to recognise that our identity is really made up mostly of “arbitrary fate” as The Other Clark says.
Now I’ve got “Free Will” by Rush going through my head.
Great post, as usual hawkgrrrl. I was in a similar situation as you, could have attended colleges both in-state and out of state, there were several options, but chose to go cross-country to BYU.
Looking back now, I realize that wasn’t the best choice for me, but I was like that twig you mentioned, being pulled in a stream of expectations. So on one hand I recognize that wasn’t the best choice, but on the other hand I try to be soft on my 18 year old self. Expecting that 18 year old to make a decision against the will of her family, without financial support, is frankly unrealistic.
So while we are often at crossroads of our lives, and looking back in hindsight it appears that we may or may not have made the right decision, the context of that decision-making is never so simple.