Things are beginning to take shape. By taking shape I mean that there are two options that seem to be completely valid ways to move forward intentionally as a family. And those two options couldn’t be any more different.

To be fair smaller paths may have presented themselves prior to this point, which is the period of time that I am now referring to is being hit by a cosmic 2 x 4, however, these just didn’t feel right. Like way down in my core, they felt a bit icky. Not for any good reason in particular, other than I knew I would be taking these options out of fear that nothing better would come along, rather than it being the right choice for my family. They felt rushed, or confining, or just didn’t allow for the opportunity for our family to experience something different. They lacked that certain je ne sais quoi.

I am just now, able to look back on the past few months. And it just felt like I was riding in a giant tsunami wave and then nothing I did mattered. The situation was what it was, and I rode that wave and it feels as though it’s finally crescendoed and we are on the optimistic ride to shore. In choosing to ride the wave and not fight it, or try to change it, or fear it (to be fair there was a legitimate amount of fear) I have come out the other side with the ability to start fresh and let my destiny to unfold.

It seems as though we have two paths forward. One the comfortable, well-known path, the one you have been on for years with many comforts and a clear course ahead. But the other path has less ware, with the lure of the unknown, and promise of a great adventure. I continue to hem and haw over this predicament.

And so in honor of the current happenstance I find myself in, I want to share one of my all-time favorite poems by the great Robert Frost. There is nary a better afternoon spent than delving into some poetry of days gone past. I have a deep kinship to Frost because one of his houses was a few towns over from where I grew up. It was a place I fondly remember going to in grade school on class outings, and then continued my connection to the writer and the land by using it as a pilgrimage of mild debauchery in my teenage years. So please enjoy this piece of literature that I have turned to many times over the years.

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

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.