The Road Not Taken

Today I'm thinking about the words of Robert Frost in his penetrating poem, "The Road Not Taken." When faced with a choice between two roads, which to him at the time seemed pretty equally desirable, he chose the one less traveled. But he did not completely abandon the other maintaining that he would keep it for another day. And then the terrible reality hit him, and he responded resolutely with those powerful but somber words, "Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back."

There are so many goodbyes and separations in life. There are so many ways that lead on to other ways, and there are so many, many people, extraordinary people in one way or another, who inevitably get left behind no matter how much we deplore that idea. Life is complex, and its paths are endless, but our ability to trace all of them out are finite. Thank the Lord for planes, phones, the postal service, text messages, and e-mails. But all the computers in the world could not enable us to remain in relationship with that throng of people we feel should be included in our circle.

As painful as it is to confront the doubt that there will be enough days in our life to return to this spot and explore that interesting person we left behind, we somehow have to make peace with it. It helps to remember that life has been constituted as it is by God. It is a limitation He has placed on us that will make it impossible to keep alive a relationship with every person we have ever known or even with every person who at one time or another has been important to us.

As in so many other areas of life, we must accept our limitations and strike a balance between quantity and quality. For example, if God has given us a spouse and/or children, it is more important to focus on them than it is to keep alive relationships with friends we met long ago. And even a person who has no close family ties is usually assigned, by God, to a relatively small group of friends in whose lives he can make a real difference if he concentrates his social energy on these people. The opposite of concentration is dilution. If we don't concentrate on these most important relationships which God has placed in our life, we run the risk of diluting our effectiveness with all our relationships. We are all aware and not impressed by the caricature of the salesman or politician who wants to know and be known by as many people as possible but whose relationships are mostly hollow and meaningless.

Like Frost, occasionally we may look back on some of the many roads not taken, or more appropriately here, on all the interesting and wonderful people who have drifted away. But knowing that our finiteness in these matters is a limitation God has imposed on us should prevent guilt. Most of our time should not be spent sadly and nostalgically looking backward on relationships which have been broken or interrupted for one reason or another but rather joyously walking or even skipping down the road taken. And besides, in heaven we will one day get to probe to the depths those relationships which life in this world has forced us to temporarily neglect.