Usually the New Year is kind of a meaningless holiday to me. The beginning of the schoolyear always felt more like a real beginning than January 1. But these first days of 2008 feel like a new road.

Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” has come to mind off and on, because though it’s often quoted in praise of marching to your own drummer, it’s really a poem about the uncertainty of choosing between roads that are “really about the same.” The last stanza has an irony about it: “Someday I’ll make a big deal out of this choice, because that’s what old folks do. But standing here at the trailheads, it’s really more of an eenie- meenie- miney kind of a thing.”

Yet regardless, the last line rings true. The roads we choose can end up making “all the difference,” even if we decide by flipping a coin. My family changed course in some important areas in 2007.  Where will our decisions lead us “ages and ages hence”?

I’m submitting this poem to Poetry Friday, hosted here today. Here a link to some of Robert Frost’s comments about it. And here’s the whole text:

The Road Not Taken (1915)

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.

(Rest of the poem is here.)