my 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.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how life plays out.

Several things have led to these musings...the first being the amazing movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The movie, of course, is about a boy who is born an old man, and instead of aging year by year, he becomes younger and younger. It seems like a simple plot line, but when you look deeper, the movie deals with so many amazing and far-out concepts.

One of these was 'the butterfly effect'...the concept that every little tiny thing that happens in life...from answering a phone call to getting distracted by something small makes a difference in not only your life, but in the lives of everyone on the planet. We are all connected and our lives intertwine. You hear the phone ring as you're about to leave the house for work and decide to pause and answer it...someone else gets your cab. Because that person gets the cab first and is therefore not late for work, they are able to keep their job...and because you got the later cab, you show up to work a few minutes late but end up running into/meeting the love of your life (who you would have missed had you arrived a few seconds earlier) on the sidewalk outside.

It's mind-boggling to think about all the things that happen and how our lives are all connected. It's really actually beautiful...but it can make you paranoid if you think about it too much, because even though the examples I gave were positive, negative things happen in this manner, as well, and it's scary to realize that.

It makes you wonder what you've passed up because of small choices you've made.

I wonder what I've given up. Right now, I'm wondering if a choice I made kept people from ending up together. I can think of at least 5 people right off the top of my head that may have been significantly affected by a choice I made recently. Now, really, there's no way to know that things wouldn't have ended up the same way had I not made the choice I made, so I'll never know. Just as way leads on to way, one choice leads to another choice. There is never truly a way to get back to the original choice once other people's lives have been affected...so you can never go back and find out. Additionally, when you affect another person's life with a choice you make, you unwittingly send them down another path which will lead them to another path, thus taking them even further from the original situation as well.

I don't know if I'm making any sense...I've just been haunted by these thoughts lately.