Living with Decisions

While reading voiceover blogs in the middle of the night, I came across this interesting analysis of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." It raises interesting questions about assumptions, interpretation, reading in context, and decision making.

First the poem, then the video.

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.

Perhaps Frost was urging us to commit to our decisions, and not dwell so much on what might have been or if we can ever go back to take the different road. The decisions we make are loaded with consequences, sometimes good, sometimes bad. We always have opportunities to change our course and gradually get closer to the direction a different path might have taken us, but is it possible to turn around, retrace our steps, and choose the other fork? Whenever I have tried this, I end up stuck in one spot, "spinning my wheels."

I've already stuck my toes into the voiceover pool to test the waters, and I'm slowly lowering myself in. I'm already a few steps down that road, so I can't really "go back", but I could trample through the brush between becoming and not becoming a voiceover actor, yet years later, if I looked back at this moment, and sighed would it be a sigh of satisfaction or of regret?

Whichever road we do choose, it does make all the difference.