Grief Comes In Many Forms

We Don’t only Grieve for those who’ve departed — we grieve the selves we haven’t become

Andrea Cosnowsky

In Robert Frost’s, “The Road Not Taken”, most people quote the end of the poem, in which the poet speaks of taking the road less traveled and how it makes all the difference. It is usually the quote that is used to encourage the reader to forge their own path; to follow roads that have not been worn by the masses. This is a fine use of the poem, if that is the intention of the instructor.

However, what is less often quoted is the stanza that comes prior to the one more quoted, where we read the lines:

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.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org /poems/44272/the-road-not-taken

Focusing on this aspect of making choices is usually not taught in college English classes across the country. Choices are wonderful things. We love to have choices and to be able to choose one thing over another. People have even made fortunes influencing others to choose what they have chosen. What we don’t focus upon is that **when we make a choice, we leave another choice behind. ** Sometimes, we don’t get the opportunity to return to that initial choice and get a ‘do-over’. When we look back and see that we’ve made a choice that may or may not have panned out as we’d planned, there is a sense of grief.

There is a value to acknowledging that grief, if only for a brief moment in time.

When I was younger, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee to pursue my dream of becoming a songwriter. As I wrote and tried to hone my craft, I was drawn to the idea of buying and holding real estate. However, I worked as a waitress and had little disposable income. Also, I didn’t want to focus on any other endeavors that would derail me from my goal of writing professionally.

I eventually did end up buying and selling a few properties, and was able to make a modest profit. However, looking back, had I held on even longer and waited for the explosive housing boom to hit, the opportunity would have been most lucrative.

I don’t regret the decisions I made. I made them with all of the information I had at the time.

But the more emotional decisions I’ve made along the way: Such as, who I chose to date, who I chose to stop being being friends with, the profession I chose one over the other — these are the choices which hold a modicum of grief.

I could have taken either direction, and either direction would have yielded more choice. None were necessarily better, just different. Sometimes, I pause to reflect on the paths I didn’t take. I choose to actively acknowledge and even grieve the choices I didn’t choose. Sometimes I speculate on what life would have looked like had I made those choices instead.

**When I return to the here and now, I have gratitude for what I have. **

It is good to once in awhile, pause to reflect on what directions I didn’t choose. When I do this, I am able to more fully be present in my life and to move on knowing that life has worked out exactly the way it was supposed to have all the time.

For more articles on spiritual reflections, please visit my blog: www.spirituallens.com