Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by…
Robert Frost’s famous poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ narrates a traveller’s choice to take one of two options when he came to a junction in a yellow wood. It “has made all the difference,” he says of his choice to take a path previously untrodden.
I think of this poem often, particularly when I think of the way my life has taken me further and further from some of the people I have met along the way. People who have taken a different turning to me at key junctions.
The truth about forest roads, or paths, is that there is rarely just one junction. There are, rather, many. Each junction offers you options, sometimes a variety of options, for routes of travel. Sometimes, I can tell you, there are very good reasons why people don’t travel down certain paths. Nettles, mud, traps… monsters.
It has been a long time since I left the place where I grew up, the windswept beaches and rough heathery hillsides of north east Northumberland. For various, complicated, reasons I don’t feel like that place was ever where I ‘came from’ - I have a sense of personal rootlessness with which I have gradually grown more comfortable. Nevertheless I remain surprisingly attached to it. I can see its landscapes pin sharp in my mind’s eye.
I first noticed the nature of that attachment when travelling back there about thirty years ago - I crossed the Tyne bridge on the train from London and I got a sudden, almost overwhelming, sense of being ‘back’. It was strange and intangible - I suppose there’s something similar being expressed in Johnny Cash’s ‘Hey Porter’, although his connection was to the ‘South’ whereas mine has always been to the ‘North’. I get a similar thing now when I drive past the Angel of the North, or indeed when I cross the Tyne.
But I’ve been ‘away’ for a long time, and despite the sharpness of my memories, the place I knew as a kid has changed - of course. Because place is synonymous, in my mind anyway, with people. It is people give context to place. That’s true for me, anyway. The Berwick I knew in my teens, the town I grew up in after we had left the farms I lived on as a child, has gone, because the people I knew it with are gone. It’s sort of the same, I suppose, but also not. I suppose it’s like finding a sweater that looks like one you loved, and realising that there’s just something different about the way it fits, or feels, or smells.
Recently I found out that one of those people who shaped the place I knew is now gone forever. He died too young, before reaching his fiftieth year, he died having taken a different path from me several years ago, he died without my having seen him for, I suppose, decades. I have a couple of old photographs in which he remains, immortally young - remote, and untouched by the fates.
Learning that he had died stirred up in me strange feelings that confused loss with belonging - a feeling that I came to think of as '(be)longing’. I grieved for him, and for those who loved him and the pain they all must have experienced. And at the same time found that I grieved too for something long gone, for roads never travelled, and paths never taken. Avenues which I sort of wanted to walk again, but never could.
The deepest sort of spiritual wisdom, I suspect, has to do with learning to let go. That, after all, is more or less the hardest thing to do. Learning to live with an open palm rather than a fist that clings tightly to anything precious.
But to truly live in the present means to find a way of letting go of the past, not to deny or negate its importance, but to accept that what was no longer is. This must be true of people and place, and that’s a tough truth to have to accept.
At each junction in the forest of life we must choose to follow a path, through “open glade, dark glen, and secret dell” and learn to accept the delights, and disappointments, we find there - and ultimately in so doing we perhaps discover that it is only in loss that we can recognise (be)longing.
Thanks. Similar feelings about 'where I'm from', where's home where do we 'belong'... Lived out if Cornwall now longer than I lived in it. 🙃