An Overwhelming Tuesday and a Literary Lifeline

Overwhelmed today with all that needs to be done. I’m thoroughly fatigued with the details and depressed by the emptiness of the space - have completely realized in the past week that surroundings being ‘in order’ are critical for my psychological well being! I'm irritated with the real estate company here who is fighting me over a perfectly reasonable request. Call me crazy, but the concept of ‘customer service’ should somehow resonate when someone is investing hundreds of thousands of dollars and has waited 2 ½ years for delivery of a condo!!!! Argh. More later on that.

Was brought back to focus today by an endearing message from Stavestatic … which I’ve gotta admit made me – even in the midst of a hellacious day – stop and get a bit misty. In it, he shared a favorite poem, indicating that while I may know it – it is always worthy of another read. I could feel my mind reciting the lines from memory, though it has radically different meaning today than in high school. So many paths not taken, not circled back to, and still others that had to be taken to learn the sometimes harsh lesson that they did not need walking again, that the best way out is usually through and not backwards, and that things are not always what they seem. As way leads on to way, even if you circle back to the paths not chosen, indeed you are never the same person after having traveled. Yup, that Frost – even in his deceptive simplicity, he was onto something. This all prompted another Runtz’s English class flashback: “I am a part of all that I have met,” (Tennyson’s Ulysses, if you’re too lazy to Google…) – restlessly setting out on this next path (in ‘the untravelled world’): alone but rarely lonely; or perhaps lonely but rarely alone? A classic double edged sword. Wherever your life is today, I invite you also to read this gift of reflection with new eyes:

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 onto 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 took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference

Robert Frost