Perceptions

This morning I was going to write a blog about the poem by Robert Frost called, The Road Not Taken. 
It has been a favorite of my mothers and I think it is the last few lines that catches most people.

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less travelled by."

Here is the full poem:

The Road Not Taken

by: Robert Frost

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 marked 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.

 It is a great poem, getting us to think about how we make the choices we do in life and how difficult they can be.  Once down one path it is very hard to go back to the beginning and start all over.  Even if you do go back and change a decision it is with the imprint of the experiences you had on your first path, which will then change how things will be on your second path.  So, really you are just coming to another fork in the road.

 

In looking up a bit of an analysis about this poem I found a few references saying that some believe that this poem, according to Frost was intended as a gentle jab at his great friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas, with whom he used to take walks through the forest and that Thomas would complained at the end that they should have taken a different path and that Frost was amused at the interpretation of the poem as inspirational.

So, whether true or not I went from thinking about the paths we take, why we choose the ones we do, to thinking about perceptions and that often we are making decisions based on how we perceive something.  

Often we think we are correct about how we are perceiving something, to find out that we were wrong.

In Patanjali's yoga sutras these perceptions are written about as fluctuations of consciousness and over the next few days I will try to write a bit about these sutras.

Namaste.

Pamela Nelson

http://www.plnyoga.vpweb.com/