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As we travel our life journey, we
make choices, and then we live with the consequences of those
choices. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In
that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies
our growth and our freedom.” Viktor E. Frankl.
Life does not consist of only a few
major “left turn or right turn” decisions, but of millions of
judgments. Some of those choices are seemingly of little significance,
while others are clearly enormous. But small or large, each decision
leads on to the next and the next after that. In The Road Not
Taken, Robert Frost brilliantly captured the principle that “way leads
on to way” and our available options down the road are defined in sizeable
measure by our previous decisions.
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. And yet, while we are not likely to
backtrack and return to where the “roads diverged in a yellow wood,” I
rejoice in the fact that we CAN go back — if we so choose — and from there
choose a different path. Previous choices are direction, but they are
NOT destiny. Previous choices have consequences, but those
consequences are NOT immutable. Just as we have the power to choose,
we have the power to CHOOSE AGAIN and to CHOOSE DIFFERENTLY. We can
repent, rebuild, return to love, make restitution, and move on.
In addition, we have the power to
create or reimagine different options that are not naturally presented to
us. In other words, using Robert Frost’s metaphor, we are free not
only to choose one road or another, but we are also free to forge our own
path, to push cross-country through the woods where no road previously
existed. Sometimes the “road less traveled by” is not a road at all,
but merely a break in the underbrush or a game trail that leads to . . .
who knows where.
Where it inevitably leads, from my
own experience, is to some grand adventure. And as Helen Keller put
it, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
The power to take responsibility
for our choices and the resulting consequences — Stephen R. Covey calls it
being “response-able” — is to me the essence of being alive, fully
alive. I am grateful to understand that I am free to act and not
merely to be acted upon. It is THAT knowledge that has made all the
difference in my life.
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