One of the reasons I love time travel, Reader, is because I love timelines. I love the idea of parallel universes all lined up like slices of bread (and, according to string theory, maybe they really are), and that we make choices and choose paths that take us down certain roads. With time travel, and with parallel universes, none of those divergent paths are ever really pruned (there’s my Loki reference). It’s a beautiful idea, really, that all our other lives are out there, just waiting for us.
Because that’s what story does. It gives us infinite possibility. It gives us dreamscapes as landscapes. And most of all, story gives us the tools to create our lives. Not just all our parallel lives, and our unlived lines, that play out on some other timeline of “what if?” But story is how we make sense of our lives right now, of how we came to be where we are, and who we are. We were born to these parents, went to these schools, learned these things, had these experiences, met these people, and now, Reader, here we are. And how we tell that story, what details we focus on, what things we emphasize as good or bad or particularly impactful, that’s what matters. That’s how we make the stories of our lives.
That’s why, Reader, the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is such a great poem. It’s largely misunderstood (I contend), and that’s fine, because poetry brings words to the table, and the Reader brings reading to the table, and both meet in the liminal space in between. It’s not perfect. A tree is a sound represented by shapes that refers to a thing in nature. When I say “tree,” do you see an oak? A pine? A Crayola-drawn tree with the ever-present tree hole? (I always drew a black tree hole in my crayon trees, Reader. I’m detail oriented.) Language is an imperfect agreement of meaning, and that’s one of the reasons why I love it so much. We make meaning in the spaces.
But I, as always, digress.
In the poem, Frost says that “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and, because traveling often means going forward, without the chance to double back and do all the things you missed (ah, the road is a metaphor for life!), he had to pick a road. They both are pretty much the same. He says that a lot. One led to some undergrowth, one looked slightly greener in grass, but they were “worn about the same” and “that morning equally lay in leaves.” Ah, now we’re getting down to it. There are some slight differences, but the differences, Reader, aren’t all that different. They both have good qualities. But a choice must be made, and so our poet chooses. And then, THEN, this is where it really gets good, because he says “I shall be telling this with a sigh, ages and ages hence.” Reader, he says he’s going to tell the story of choosing these roads, sometime in the distance future, and what is he going to tell his audience? NOT what he told us. Not about the pretty much equal wear, not about the equal leaf coverage. He’s going to tell his audience, when he tells the story of the divergent roads, that he “took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Aha! He’s creating his own meaning, Reader. We don’t know what difference it made, or where he ended up, or where the other road led. And the audience that he’s telling the story to in the future certainly doesn’t know that either. All they will know is what he tells them, that he took the road less traveled by and that it made all the difference.
But we, the Reader, get to go along more of the journey, not just the telling of the story, but we get to experience the story: the yellow wood, the diverging paths, the grass, the wear, the undergrowth in the distance. He shows us the moment of his choice, and then he shows us what he plans to say about it. And that, Reader, THAT is what makes this poem great. Because the poet is showing us how he makes meaning of his choices, and how he builds the story of his life. And he’s showing us that this is something we all do. We all make choices, and then we weave those choices into our narratives.
And the story we tell ourselves is more important than the roads we take.
That last line is **chefs kiss