The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost
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.
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Occasionally I dig out my book of Robert Frost poems and read this and a couple other favorites. Myself, I have no cellphone, don't have cable TV and just got an DVD player a couple months ago. I got the DVD so I could review the edits of a community TV news program I help edit. Likewise, I finally got a PC at home and hooked up to high-speed Internet in February. I'm definitely not surfing on the leading edge of technology.
I recently attended a technology seminar in San Fransisco and, of the 500 people attending, I may have been the only one without a cellphone. I might have been the only only without an official business card also. However, in these cases I hand out one of my band business cards. They are amusing at first sight and later leave people puzzled as to what it is I actually do for a living. What would life be without amusement and confusion?
Sometimes watching ants while sitting in the shade drinking iced tea is enough to keep me occupied. I know there will be stretches of rapids ahead in the white water of my life, as there has been in the past. Likewise, I appreciate the calm parts of life's river where the current of the moment glides you through an hour of loafing.
I read an interesting commentary on staying too in touch with your everyday world. I found these very telling observations in this commentary by John Krist:
I had some appointments of my own. There were some ospreys atop a dead Douglas fir downstream that I planned to watch. I intended to rendezvous with several groves of western red cedars. There were some polished rocks on a gravel bar demanding my attention, some sandy beaches requiring inspection.
I did not, however, require a watch to keep these appointments. They would occur, or not, on a schedule determined by the current and the movement of the sun and moon across the sky. On a wild river, in the middle of one of the largest wilderness areas in the lower 48, a beeping wristwatch is about as useful as an anvil.
But it is so hard to sever the technological tethers that bind us to the world we have built. They grow stronger and draw tighter with each year: cellphones, pagers, laptop computers with wireless modems, e-mail, Global Positioning Systems, instant messaging, 24-hour television news, satellite radio that floods even the great empty spaces of the West with an unceasing barrage of music, news, commentary and commercials.
Read the entire commentary in the Denver Post.
John Krist's writings also appear in the High Country News.
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Sometimes less is more...
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