They say it’s the journey and not the destination. Hard to argue with that kinetic theory of life and our elusive search for happiness. And yet — to wax Zen — it seems the more complex the problem, the simpler the solution. In short, as Warren Zevon succinctly put it as he was dying of lung cancer, “enjoy every sandwich.”
There was always something so mysterious and evocative about the branches of the Yellow Brick Road not taken by Dorothy Gale, et al. To what horizons, what adventures, what dangers, what possibilities… to what-what… did those paths lead? It’s nothing any sequel could ever tell us, as the moment in time, and our own perspective, will have irrevocably changed. This is the very same reason that, as Thomas Wolfe said, you can’t go home again. Because home isn’t home anymore and you, for better or worse, aren’t the same you. Better mostly, I think.
Choices can be hard. The choosing even harder. So why don’t we leave the last word to Robert Frost from his poem “The Road Not Taken” (1915):
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.
Great Exudations 