On Not Being Someone Else

Pere Magloire on the Road to Saint Clair by Gustave Caillebotte (1884)

To live is to choose. As humans, we all encounter a seemingly infinite number of forks on the road of life. From education to careers, relationships to kids, virtues to vices, vacations to finances, and so on. Have you ever reflected on your unled lives? The paths you did not embark on.

Instead of asking: “Who am I?” Who are you not?

In his famous poem, The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost wrote,

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.

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Frost raises a harsh truth — none of us can be one traveler. It’s not possible to embark on two paths simultaneously. As Frost’s traveler did, one must discern and ultimately make a move.

In his book, On Not Being Someone Else, author Andrew H. Miller writes,

Frost’s tone is mild, but his thought is extravagant: to be sorry, you can’t be one traveler on two roads — to be sorry you can’t be two places at once — to be sorry for what you are, for what we are. It’s to be sorry for being a person.

“The Road Not Taken” is a poem of metaphysical resignation, observes Miller, of sorrow at our inevitable relinquishments. And yet this deep sorrow was prompted by something tiny, merely a fork in the woods, leading to two roads “about the same.”

The notion of unled lives connects with what the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard called the essence of philosophy — regret.