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Robert Frost wrote a poem entitled “The Road Not
Taken”. While I’ve never been much for
deciphering the meanings of poems, this one is pretty much a no-brainer. The poem begins with the statement,” Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and sorry I could not travel both…”
Who hasn’t looked back at least once in their life and
wondered about the road not taken?
Everyone reaches a fork in the road of life, and while both options may
be equally enticing, we can only travel down one road at a time. As I write this column, I am preparing for a
trip to Hollywood, to attend a friend’s wedding. This will be my fourth trip out to the West
Coast, and although I always enjoy my visits there, I can’t help wondering
about that particular road not taken.
I’ve always had a huge interest in the entertainment
industry. My parents encouraged my love
of movies and television. While other
young girls planned their dream weddings, I planned my Oscar acceptance speech.
In high school, my best friend’s father worked for NBC, and on several
occasions procured tickets for us to see “Saturday Night Live”. My friend and I
both attended Emerson College, where we majored in Mass Communications, hoping
to pursue our own careers in the entertainment industry.
During my senior year at Emerson, I participated in a
school-sponsored trip to Hollywood over Christmas break. This trip allowed students to meet Emerson
alumni working in the business, get a backstage glimpse of the film and
television industry, and hopefully make connections for the future. It was exciting and exhausting. My final semester at Emerson, I interned at a
local television station, and was hired as an audience coordinator for their
live talk show upon graduation.
That job led to another production job, which in turn led to
yet another in the industry, this time at the company where I met my husband, a
video editor. By this time I had worked
my way up from audience coordinator to office manager to producer/writer. My husband and I settled here on the South
Shore and had two children. Hollywood
only factored into my daily life in the pages of my subscription to
“Entertainment Weekly”.
And so, as I embark on yet another trip west, I think about
the road not taken. What if I had
contacted the alumni we met on our Hollywood trip back in 1985? Would I have dared travel west to make a name
for myself? Would I be working for one
of the hundreds of production companies or studios that populate Los
Angeles? Would I have eventually found
myself standing at the podium of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or the Kodak
Theater, thanking my parents for supporting my dream and dedicating my Oscar to
them? I’ll never know.
I’m okay with that.
If I had taken that road, I
wouldn’t have met my husband. Without
him, my two amazing children wouldn’t exist.
I live close enough to my parents to visit them several times a
year. Living on the left coast, I might
have only seen them once a year, if that.
Had I taken the other road, I might be writing for some
third rate sitcom or B-movie, instead of entertaining folks with stories of
smug Christmas letters or accidentally brushing my teeth with antifungal cream.
And what about my faith?
Would I have found my faith if I had taken that other road? I’d like to think that I would, but who
knows? I might be having my thetan
levels audited by a senior member of the Church of Scientology instead.
Robert Frost ends his poem with “..two roads diverged in a
wood and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” Is he convincing himself that he made the
right choice or lamenting the road not taken?
Personally, I think it’s fine to occasionally ponder the untraveled fork
as long as you don’t let it derail the journey you are on. Rather, let it remind you of all the
blessings you’ve received on the road you did
choose.
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