Post Creative Challenge for July 2023: The Road Taken
Created | Updated Jul 23, 2023
Don't Panic! You can still get your monthly Create fix. Just follow the h2g2 Post's monthly challenges. You can procrastinate your writing exercises the same as usual.
Post Creative Challenge for July 2023: The Road Taken
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If you attended school in the US, chances are good you had to read a poem called 'The Road Not Taken'. It begins:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood... |
You may even have sung the poem set to music in school choir. If you had a question about it on a test, you dutifully lied and said the poem's meaning was that sometimes on the 'road of life', a person could make a fateful decision to make a bold move – to strike out on the 'road less traveled by'. This would be a Noble Thing to do. You would get an A for this lie.
The ghost of Robert Frost would laugh for the 42,000th time, no doubt.
According to Frost, he wrote that poem to poke gentle fun at his English friend Edward Thomas. Thomas, also a poet, was chronically indecisive. Once, on a walk together, they'd taken a fork in the road. Thomas spent the rest of the walk telling Frost how much nicer the other fork would have been. Frost sent Thomas the poem as a joke. Thomas interpreted the poem more or less the same way as your English teacher did. Sigh.
For this challenge, I'm going to ask you to try to ignore a hundred years' worth of bad English essays and tell me about 'The Road Taken'.
Have you ever set out to get somewhere, failed utterly, but found yourself on an entirely different sort of trip? What happened to you?
The journey in question could be literal, like the New Yorker who thought he was getting a bargain ticket to Sydney, Australia – only to end up in Sidney, Montana. (Spelling counts.)
Your journey could also be of a more abstract nature. I once thought I was attending a memorial service for the end of the Second World War in Germany. I wondered why attendance was so sparse. As the speaker began to praise the heroic accomplishments of the Soviet Union (with a little help from the Anti-Hitler Coalition), it dawned on me why we were standing on the little Bonn redoubt overlooking the Rhine and not in front of some major monument in Bad Godesberg. I had landed at the communist ceremony. It was highly interesting.
Do you personally tend to see the world as Edward Thomas did, always worried about what you'd missed? Or is your outlook more like Robert Frost's, appreciating the accidents as much as what you'd planned for? Let us know: tell us your stories.
