The Road Taken ... 2015

(Watercolor by Aarti Mehta)

The inspiration for this post is my coming across, after many years, the famous century-old poem by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken:

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.

There have been many interpretations of this poem, and it is not my intent to provide yet another. Rather, this poem spurred me to introspect on the process of life decisions, and the learning from them.

Two or more roads always diverge at various points of time in ones life - from the simplest decisions of traveling from one place to another, to the more complex ones of choosing a school and line of education, choosing a life partner, deciding on which employment choices to make, and for some of us, which religion, if any, to follow. Add to this the timing factor, recognizing that the rest of the environment does not remain static.

Standing at a fork, Frost refers to the visibility one may have until the next bend in each road. That puts forth the challenge of extrapolation - is the visible part of each road a representative sample of the road thereafter? Nobody will disagree that it is most certainly not. Management scientists call this problem "decision making under uncertainty". Business schools provide several objective criteria to solve this problem. A popular solution approach is the "MinMax" solution - that is, take that road which maximizes the expected value of your objective function in the most adverse of conditions. This approach presupposes that one knows a characterization of the uncertainties (measured in probabilities and standard deviations). Clearly, life decisions do not offer the quantification of uncertainties like the business situation.

Thus, I suggest, that deep analysis is futile, as it mostly plays out scenarios in your mind that will never play out in real life. Instead, it can help to recognize that each road has an upside, and after that short analysis, the focus ought to be on a quick and unhesitating execution. Quick, because you want to start deriving the potential of the decision sooner than later. Unhesitating, because hesitation and doubt play to the down side and not up side, and compromise the enjoyment of the potential of the decision.

Now to the many factors that play into the analysis. A fly-on-the-wall view projecting time forward can show that many seemingly important factors are totally unimportant. The baggage of culture and tradition are examples of those. "What will someone think" is another. There may be other forces using emotional blackmail, intentionally or with good intentions. These are to be cursorily rejected because they are not in the same frame of reference as you are at that fork in the road. "If I were you" points of view are irrelevant, because you will never be me!

What seems to work is extreme awareness of oneself and the environs to see and create forks in the road. Agility to assess the trajectory and take corrective action on the direction. And, relish the choices that come forth - whether created by you or those that get presented to you unexpectedly.

There are also some, like someone close to me, for whom choice is not a choice in a dessert shop. Sampling all delicacies without filling up with any one is her strategy to enjoy the surprises behind the glass of the sweets cabinet - some that are too sweet, some that are just right, and others that are not sweet enough!