“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”
I don’t remember exactly when I first read The Road Not Taken. Probably in a classroom, somewhere between homework assignments and lunch. But I remember when it landed—not as poetry, but as philosophy.
There was a moment—years later—when life split in two. Two real options. Two directions. No clear winner. No whispered sign from the universe. I stood at my metaphorical fork and waited for a feeling to tip the scale.
It never came.
So I chose the less certain path. Not because it was brave or noble or poetic. Just because something in it called to me. Quietly. Persistently.
The Honest Middle
What I love most about Frost’s poem is its honesty. That little twist in the middle:
“Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same…”
It’s not a triumphant declaration. It’s a shrug. A sigh. A confession that maybe both paths would’ve worked out fine—or not. We never get to know the life we didn’t live.
Most of us miss this part. We’re so caught up in those famous final lines that we skip over Frost’s admission: the roads were “equally lay.” In the moment of choosing, they looked remarkably similar. The speaker even admits he’s “saving the first for another day”—though he doubts he’ll ever come back.
This hit me like a revelation. How many times have I looked back at pivotal moments and crafted narratives about taking the “road less traveled”? How often do we retroactively assign meaning to choices that, in the moment, looked indistinguishable?
The Beautiful Necessity of Mythology
And yet. “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”
Here’s what strikes me now: maybe that mythologizing isn’t deception. Maybe it’s necessary. We need our choices to matter; we need to believe the path we walked was somehow right, meaningful, ours.
The genius isn’t in Frost encouraging us to be contrarians. It’s in recognizing this deeply human need to create significance from uncertainty. We shape our narratives as much as they shape us.
Making Meaning on the Way
Looking back, the roads I’ve taken weren’t always glamorous. But they were mine. Marked by gut instinct, good people, unexpected detours, and the stubborn belief that meaning isn’t found on the map; it’s made on the way.
Every path becomes “the road less traveled” when you walk it with full commitment. When you bring your authentic self to the journey, regardless of how well-worn the trail might be. The difference isn’t in the choosing—it’s in the walking.
Your road less traveled might be the conventional choice everyone else was making too. It might be staying instead of leaving; the practical decision instead of the romantic one. The “less traveled” lives in how intentionally you move forward, how fully you own the choice once made.
The Quiet Pull
If you’re standing at a fork right now—uncertain, tired, tempted to wait for a clearer sign— I can’t tell you which way to go. But I will say: listen for the quiet pull. Trust that the path you choose, fully chosen, becomes the right one.
We mythologize choice because we must; because the alternative is paralysis. Because sometimes the most profound decisions happen not in dramatic moments of clarity, but in quiet instants when something calls to us persistently, and we finally answer.
The roads diverge. We choose. We walk. We make it matter.
Alysa Gerlach is a financial strategist, operational leader, and builder of teams My approach centers on delivering value while driving fiscally responsible growth. In the higher education sector, I embraced the philosophy of “doing more with less,” leveraging my private sector experiences. At Northeastern
