Which path to take…

Frequently honoured during his lifetime, Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He was an American poet born in 1874 who died in 1963. He wrote about ordinary life in New England, and felt that poetry must show the poet and the reader something they didn’t know they knew.
“The Road Not Taken” is among Frost’s most celebrated poems, yet it is widely misinterpreted, often taken as a simple ode to “following your own path.” In truth, the poem subtly critiques this notion. David Orr, in The Paris Review, described this misconception, pointing out: “The poem’s speaker claims he will recount, someday, how he chose the less traveled* road, yet he admits that the paths ‘equally lay / In leaves’ and ‘the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.’ Thus, the ‘less traveled’ road he plans to describe is actually just as traveled as the other. The two paths are indistinguishable.”

Frost originally wrote the poem as a playful jab at his friend Edward Thomas, who was famously indecisive during their walks, struggling to choose a path. In a New York Times review of Brian Hall’s 2008 biography, Fall of Frost, it was noted: “Whichever way they go, they’re sure to miss something good on the other path.” As for the “sigh” in the final stanza, it could suggest either regret or satisfaction. However, there is a significant contrast between the speaker’s present description of the paths and what he anticipates saying in the future. Frost’s biographer, Lawrance Thompson, recalls that Frost, before reading the poem aloud, once remarked, “You have to be careful with that one; it’s a tricky poem—very tricky,” hinting at its ironic undertones.

Thompson proposes that the narrator is someone who consistently expends energy regretting his choices, wistfully sighing over the appealing alternatives he declined. He also noted that when Frost introduced the poem, he often mentioned the speaker was inspired by Thomas, whom he described as “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way.”
The Road not taken

I’m one of three siblings and I have always noted how different I am from my siblings, how different we all are from each other, so that, in the nature or nurture argument I would come down on the side of character and chance happenings equally influencing how one turns out. One sister, like Frost’s friend Edward Thomas, would dither about making a decision and almost always think that she had made the wrong choice, that if at home should wish to be somewhere else, and when somewhere else, would wish to be at home.

I’ve always been pretty content with where I am and what I have decided, or where my life has taken me, and if things don’t work our I try to learn from it rather than regret what I’ve done. As an adult, I’ve always jokingly claimed that I am such a pessimist, that things never work out worse than I expect, and usually considerably better. I suppose that makes me a glass half-full person.
I wonder how this translates to what and how one writes. Whichever road one takes, the sands of time continue to run, and so Frost is right, that, by the very nature of life and time, one may never return to try the other path, as the one taken may again diverge, and make multiple further choices necessary.

Write a poem or short story based on a choice which has to be made, and perhaps write two versions where the choice made is different in the two cases.

* American spelling of traveled, used in Frost’s poem and Orr’s criticism of it, retained here.