Whenever we come upon an intersection along this circular journey, we have a choice: do we go left or right? Always go with your guts. But if this profound voice of wisdom perchance remain silent in this crucial moment, I feel it were an useful exercise to frame the decision according to a question: Does turning left increase or decrease my possibilities?
And turning right?
Often one road is the more familiar. Often the other offers more potential. To cite Robert Frost’s well-known poetic expression of this experience:
Two roads diverged in a wood, & I
I took the one less-traveled by
And that has made all the difference.
Allow me to elucidate this experience with the following hypothetical: if—whether it be by stamp of Nature, sheer coincidence, social conditioning, or for a reason beyond my apprehension-—I should stomp about like a Neanderthal with indigestion anytime I should intend to cross the living-room on two legs, then this violence against domestic tranquility represents my ordinary gait. This is the first road; the familiar one. I might ask myself, however, if there should exist other possibilities for movement? A relevant waypoint for me along this process might be walking to the freezer to hunt & gather some ice-cream. At this waypoint, I might chose to persist in my habitual pattern. But I also find the choice of diverging from my familiar path and “take the one less-traveled,” thereby discovering more nuanced movement (i.e. balanced participation of every joint along each contra-lateral chain). Then I begin to recall Frost’s poem to myself:
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And long I stood…”
If my life is a tragedy, I forget the rest of it, shrug, & continue onwards down my path of habit. If my life is a comedy, I turn left & take the road less-traveled and make all the DIFFERENCE. I can always go back to stomping if I need to.