And that has made all the difference

Image by Mohammed Aljumaily from Pixabay

You may recognize these two lines, as well as the title of this blog post, from Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Road Not Taken. It has stayed with me since high school, not because I read or studied it then, but because there was an excerpt in my English coursebook. I assumed, as many do, that this was gentle praise for those choosing their own path, the one less traveled by. Upon reading the poem in its entirety, and researching the meaning afterwards, I now know that Frost wrote the poem as a quip to a friend with whom he often went for walks and who had difficulty in choosing which way to go at a crossroad. The poem seems to lament that whichever one one chooses, it doesn’t much matter.

How disheartening! How deterministic! How against everything I believe in! And simultaneously, exactly what I believe in. It’s not so much that this specific path was the one that made all the difference, but that I made the choice, and then made the most of the path I chose. I catch myself looking back at the crossroads I’ve been at, seeing (or imagining) a better present-day down a path I did not choose, and second-guessing my reasoning then, and recalling the absolute determination of a younger me, my reasoning now. But as I look at the paths I did not take, the pit stops I might be resting at now had I taken another route, I know I couldn’t have taken them because they would not have felt right, even with all that which I now know. I have struggled to find my path, and in a tiny, insignificant way it feels like a path less traveled by, giving me courage to stomp on the grass and cut down scratchy branches to help someone else make their way, if not on the clearest of paths, then at least on the more right-for-me of paths.

In plain English: I have never had a plan, never had a clear path I want to take, nor a clear destination I want to arrive at at a certain moment. Most of my life, I have enjoyed it – most of my life, my choices were very limited: do well at school or don’t (not that that was an actual choice in my family, but I’d digress), study this language or that, play the piano or don’t. I got to practice decision-making on a larger scale when choosing subjects to focus on in high school and when deciding on my degree and university, but the framework was the same: you are graded on X,Y,Z, and if you ace all of those, then you’ll be…what? Good? Perfect? At 100%? I never thought about it much, which is one of the reasons why the transition into professional life came as a bit of a shock, especially a year or two in. Now, there was no time frame for degrees, no grades to achieve, no delimited cluster of students to compare oneself to. Suddenly, I could veer to whatever I wanted – but I had no will of my own, at least when it came to this. No North Star to follow, no lofty dreams to make a vision board out of. Just scrolling vacancies on multiple job sites and trying to package my potential and skills into experience. NOT EASY.

As I write this, I am content. I am happy where I am professionally, and I don’t regret not taking another path. I might not be here if I had, but I also might well be; or I might be in a much better place, or in a much worse. I don’t believe that any other path would have been less optimal for me (I am sure many would have been much more optimal), but every decision I have made, has made all the difference – as would have every other decision. But those do not matter, because I live the life paved by the decisions I took, not the ones that I did not.

On a Sidetrack is a blog about careers and professional life. At work, I have to stick to the point (as should others, too), but the many tangents and digressions I’d like to pursue give me energy and that’s why I’m here, on a sidetrack. I hope to see you take this ride with me, explore the world of work, and exchange thoughts.