The Road Not Taken- A Life Lesson

The poem below is by a poet named Robert Frost. It is one of my favorite poems, because it talks about making a tough decision. Normally in life, the easy, most clear, most beautiful path is the one with the danger at the end. The path that is right, is the one that is the hardest and happens to be the one that the fewest seem to go down. But it's a path that needs more people to follow it.

Please read, enjoy and think about this poem. Especially the last part that is typed in red. That is the meat of the message of the poem.

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.

Truth- It hurts going down, but is better than a lie

Would you rather be lied to, if it would make you feel better? Or would you rather hear the truth, no matter how much it hurt?

That one is a toughie for many of us.

Why?

Because on one hand, no one likes to hear bad news, or correction. But on the other hand, just because someone lies to you in order to spare you for the moment, doesn't mean that you will not have to feel the pain later.

It is much better to feel the pain now, than deal with an even bigger and far worst sting later. I know I am no different from any of you, and I hate to hear harsh words as well. But the fact is, I would much rather hear the truth than the lie. Tell me what you feel. Tell me if you don't like something. Tell me if I offended you. Tell me if you did something I won't like. Heck, tell me you don't care what I think! But please, please, don't lie to me. I hate being lied to, because the truth is so much easier in the end.

So if any of you are anything like me, you will share this with someone else who needs to be reminded that the truth is always better than the lie.

You may live to regret it...

I read this statement not too long ago which said, "never regret anything, because an one point, that was exactly what you wanted".

The second part is true, whatever you end up regretting later, is something that at one point you choose to do. Or else you choose to do something else that lead to what happened. So we can't blame anyone for the bad things that happen, because we knew the risks involved, before getting involved.

But that's not the point of this blog post. I was thinking, so many times we make poor decisions and then regret them later. But it's as if in the moment it seems to make so much sense to do. In the moment, we are blind to everything we will lose if we make that choice. In the moment it's like there is this evil voice in our head saying "do it, do it, do it"! And we tend to listen to that voice and not think about the consequences.

Then you know what happens later? We feel like crap, and we totally regret what we did.

It happens to the girl who slept with a guy on the first date. It happens to the guy who got so drunk at the party that he took his clothes off or did something else that totally made him look like an idiot. It happens to the youth that yells back at the mom and ends up grounded. It happens to the person who lies and then realizes that there is no way that that lie will stay secret. It happens to the person who was going down the right track in life and slowly starts to drift and follow bad examples, until the point where he or she does something irreparable. And the list goes on and on and on.

Thousands of people are living with regrets. And why? Because they don't take enough time to think about the consequences of there actions. They are living in the here and now, instead of thinking about the morning after. So, they ruin their life.

You and I both need to learn to think first, then act second.

If we don't...

We may live to regret it.