The grief of the paths not taken

Dealing with the sorrow of what never comes to pass

I once had a friend who reminded me of Eeyore. To him, the past was to be revered and lamented and the future was to be worried about and guarded against. I was more of a Tigger in my approach: bouncing to the next thing with enthusiasm and not taking much time to look back.

(📸 from disney.movies.com)

And then I met this guy who was utterly wonderful. He was 49, I was 41. I’d had my two kids, he’d had his one. We blended our families and, to this day, he still smells better to me than anything else on this vast, wondrous planet (including Christmas pudding, which says a lot). But now, even at 52 and 45, and even with a planned vasectomy and an unplanned hysterectomy between us, I have moments where I morph into Eeyore and lament the paths not taken. If only, my inner Eeyore cries, we’d met sooner! If only I could have had babies with this man! We would have had beautiful babies! Curly-haired cherubs with grey eyes and wide grins. If only I could have experienced parenting a toddler with this cheerful, adventurous, relentlessly positive human! 

I once read that most of us have bastardised the intended meaning of Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken (to such an extent that a whole book has been written about how ludicrously silly we’ve been in our analysis of a single poem written by a singular Scot). We think Frost’s words are about choosing the road less travelled when they’re actually about taking the road equally travelled: the paths are, in fact, equivalent to each other.

It’s human nature to look back and grieve the roads not taken, so much so that a mate of mine is future-grieving for the years she won’t be able to spend with a partner she hasn’t yet met. But perhaps there are more useful ways of looking at the paths we didn’t choose and the roads that didn’t make themselves known to us.

Perhaps the universe knows what it’s doing. Perhaps it only lights up a path at the exact moment we’re ready to traverse it. Two decades ago, my great-smelling guy was a motorcycle-riding, nightclub-owning Cleo Bachelor of the Year. He was a very responsible party boy, but all the goodness, kindness and twinkle-eyed grins in the world wouldn’t have been enough for my  ego-driven, goody-two-shoed, overly-planned younger self to glance twice at the angel-winged grubby Earth boy with whom I now dwell. 

Or perhaps, as the wonderful Rowan Mangan writes, there is just as much joy in the adventures not taken. To paraphrase Ro, there are experiences we have, and experiences we only imagine having, but research shows that there aren’t necessarily big differences between the two. “To me”, she writes, “both kinds of experience are scarily alike. When I look back at them, sometimes I remember my imagined inventures as being way richer and more life-changing than the disappointing, bedbug-strewn adventurous realities”.

Or perhaps, as Robert Frost intended us to surmise, some paths are interchangeable. We learned the lessons we were meant to learn and experienced everything we were meant to experience on the paths we stumbled upon in our misspent youth, regardless of whether or not our wiser current selves would choose them now.

Either way, there is beauty to be found on our current path. When we immerse ourselves fully in the wonders of our present wanders, we guarantee ourselves a bloody great walk. Full, grateful presence is also, I believe, the key to recognising the bends in the road when they appear. So excuse me while I take my soft, middle-aged body over to my great-smelling guy. I’ll stroke his greying hair and kiss the plentiful eye-wrinkles earned from the millions of twinkly smiles he’s handed out over his 52 years. 

The road I’m travelling looks pretty lovely today.

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