I think back to a poem read at graduation - Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken - very often. Sometimes I wonder, without clarity, if I am on the Road Not Taken, as it seems nothing has turned out as I thought it would. Being in my 20s, I am constantly reminded that these are the "glory days" when friends, lovers and good times abound; when travels will lead me to unlikely discoveries and to things I will cherish and fondly look back upon in my elder years. Yet, I wake up each morning and lead an uncomfortably quiet life.
That ubiquitous slogan, the one that once was good but is now terribly cliche calls out to me chidingly, Carpe Diem! Carpe Diem!, like a young newsboy hawking life on a corner.
I am ruled by a mighty wind that beckons me to and from work. Why? Because I need money. It's not enough to just want money - that feeling is hollow to me. I need money. For this. For that. And for everything it seems. This crucial, sadistic need ensures that the current of wind will be hard to fight against.
Sometimes I think about jumping the fence, trying another path that leads in what appears to be a different direction. Yes, yes, I know the grass never actually is greener on the other side, but it's not grass I am after...
I think about that poem and I consider that perhaps I am not yet on any road. Maybe I'm right at that part in the first stanza where as one traveler, long I stood...
I feel like I am just standing. Suspended in expectancy; for what is to become of me? How am I to make it? And what, dear God, WHAT? am I going to do?
And then I get an email, or a phone call, or on the weekends during gab fests I discover that I am not just one traveler. There, parallel to my own existence are people who are also considering on which road they are trodding. Or maybe they're standing, too. (That reminds me of sitting on a train and one moves, and you think, am I moving or is that other train?). Nevertheless, I see them across the way...
And while existences are parallel, our lives, it seems are not. We cross each other's paths in moments that turn into long evenings. We fill each other's cups with woes and worries from work - trifling little tales that invoke as much laughter as they do disgust and mind-boggling disdain. There is talk of love and the lack thereof, but always there is hope and wonder. And always, at the "right" time for me, my path is crossed and I am reunited with the world and am able to see that I am not alone.
Gratitude comes not in just words, but in the laughter that peppers our exchange, in the time that is well-spent and in the twinkling of eyes that recognize...