An Hundred Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood...

"I shall be telling this with a sigh,
somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-"
-Robert Frost "The Road Not Taken"

If only it really were TWO roads that diverged.
If only it weren't a proverbial web, spreading out in all of those directions.
Incomprehensible,
Without bounds,
Overwhelming in its multiplicity,
Paralyzing in its possibility.

If only it didn't always have to be told with a sigh.

Years ago, I sat on the couch of a familiar little apartment in Provo, UT and had the following conversation with my best friend:

Me: Sometimes I wish that life were less like life and more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Her: So that you could go back and put your thumb in it.

Did you ever do that, reader? I put more than a thumb in it. I would keep one digit between the pages of every decision I made. It always seemed as though it would be so easy to back-track if I became dissatisfied with the ending of my story, (eg if I fell down an old well and was never heard from again) so painless, so possible.

Sometimes, in my adulthood, I almost feel that same sense of possibility. Just imagine me! I still have ten digits between my two hands, and I still assert that I can recognize when an important moment is transpiring. I still have the urge to put a finger here, a finger there, to mark pivotal points, as if marking them can save me from the consequences of them.

But Oh! how those moments eat at us in the days, weeks, months, years to come: those momentous moments we mark as having transpired right before everything came crashing down. It is very probable that these "moments" are not even related to specific personal decisions. Maybe they were the products of elemental circumstances, or the decisions of someone else. In cases such as these, must we trace back further to avoid undesired consequences? Where is it then? That wrong decision? Where can we find the moment in which the stupid decision was made that led to all of this insanity?

In the seeming impossibility of tracing the genesis of the "mistake", which moment do we pin as the fatal one? If you could only go back once, trying to avoid ultimate tragedy, which moment would you choose? What if the turning point really comes in your reaction to the choices, or in your reaction to the set of circumstances, (which reactions become little choices that accumulate over time)?

What moment do we save so that we can re-visit later? Do we mark all of them and then choose once the final blow has been administered, or is that when it is already too late? Which choices only feel important, and may end up having little bearing on the outcome? Which ones seem insignificant but may rock the very foundations upon which we have built our everything?

In the final few paragraphs of what I consider to be one of the most moving novels I have ever had occasion to read on the subject of love, author David Levithan writes the following as a sort of definition for the noun Zenith:

"I'm standing in the bathroom, drying my hands on your towel, and you're hovering in the kitchen. I am happy from dinner, happy the day is over, and before I can ask you what's going on, you tell me there's something we need to talk about.
This is it, the moment before you tell me the precise thing I don't want to know.
Is this the zenith? This last moment of ignorance?
Or does it come much later?" -David Levithan "The Lover's Dictionary"

The truth is, however much we want to protect ourselves, at the end of the day, we only have ten fingers. That is not nearly enough to keep a marker on all of the potentially-life-altering moments. As if this realization is not dis-heartening enough, it is also true that the more fingers you have marking pages, the less you have available to use to turn new pages forward, the more frazzled you become, the more confused.

There comes a time when you have to take your fingers out of the page, when you have to acknowledge that no one is allowed to live outside of circumstance. No one is allowed to live non-linearly. No one is allowed to take every path, wish as we may, try as we might.

"I wish we could take every path.
I could spend a hundred years
Adoring you.
Yes, I wish we could take every path,
Because I hated to close
the door on you.

And I have never known the plan.
It's been a long, long time.
How are you?
Your eyes are green. Your hair is gold.
Your hair is black. Your eyes are blue.
I closed the ranks, and I doubled back--
but, you know, I hated to close
the dog-gone door on you.

-Joanna Newsom "Baby Birch"