By Amanda Knox

In sixth grade the best English teacher I’ve ever had—and the only one to ever make me cry—asked my class to memorize and recite Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” He may have thought it appropriate for us newly-middle-schoolers, just coming upon the crossroads of childhood and adolescence. I remember the poem striking me at the time more because it was the first time I was asked to consume and perform—alone and center stage—language. I did not immediately realize that the poem’s message was taking root. I’ve remembered it since, or at least, I’ve remembered the first stanza:

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;

I often find myself thinking about something before I realize I am thinking about it. So much internal processing occurs in the abstract—what I envision is like the grey, pearly, cloud-liquid Dumbledore deposits in his Pensieve (Yay! Harry Potter!). In that insistent and incoherent mass of thought, feeling, and memory, my mind makes meaningful connections. My brow scrunched in unconscious concern, I catch myself, as was the case this week, reciting under my breath the first stanza of a poem I memorized sixteen years ago.

I realized that I am apparently concerned about an unknown, a choice between choices. And not just the everyday choices that are the material of the present moment—Food now or later? To bite my fingernails, or not to bite my fingernails?—but a choice whose implications that will alter the dimensions of my future. Imagine a flash of light, emanating from a single point in space at a single moment in time and traveling in all directions. Because the speed of light has a limit, the light can only exist within a limited funnel of spacetime—called a light cone. Which is to say that there are times and places that flash of light will see and never see, even if it is traveling in all possible directions, encompassing all choices.

There are some choices that feel as implicating as a single flash of light in an infinite universe. If I do this, then perhaps I may never do that. If I say yes, I may no longer say no. Fight, flee, or flop? Two roads diverged in a yellow wood… And as if the rest of the poem might better articulate or perhaps resolve my own yet-unarticulated dilemma, I thought, “Well? What’s the rest of it? What happens?” I meditated on the poem, enough to memorize it again:

Then took the other, 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.

There are two ways of coming away from this poem. You might feel disappointed, annoyed even. Frost does not give any indication of how you should choose between two equally appealing choices. Safely on the other side of his choice, he sighs.

On the other hand, you may come away consoled. A choice is an act of creation inspired by knowable motivations. It is a flash of light. Whatever the choice, it makes a difference.

Enough sitting around reciting poetry.

Do something.