by Noel Shafi
January 2014
When I first read the Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, it was just another weekday afternoon in my freshman year of high school, in the upper west side neighborhood of Washington Heights. It was the year 2000, and I was a pretentious, arrogant, and confused teenage delinquent who loved poets for their audacious writing. I should acknowledge Mr. Bleier, one of my charismatic high school teachers; it was he, who introduced me to Frost’s insightful work in a passionate and instructional classroom discourse I vividly remember. His commentaries on the poem were like flying daggers to my ears. The poem itself was keen in observation, clear in imagery, and profound in message; and the sound and structure of the poem captivated my attention.
Upon reading the quintessential American poem by Frost, I knew that he spoke directly to me in my experience of encountering two roads in my everyday struggle. As someone from a low-income community, I hardly believed in the idea of having choices, but little did I know that I would have many forks on the life journey before me. In my case, my path did not diverge in a yellow wood. Rather my two roads diverged on a New York City street corner, situated on one of the highest peaks of Manhattan, and midway between my daily walk to school from home. As a 16-year-old Latino-American, I had a fundamental distrust in and disregard for the educational system. I sometimes wondered if stopping on that street corner on my way to school and simply turning back home without looking back, would be the better choice. The paths to school and returning home were filled with unknowns in terms of where they might ultimately lead. Both were viable paths, but neither seemed to have an unequivocal outcome.
School was somewhat of a wooded territory. I decided then to move forward and not be discouraged by the unknowns. Two years later, I received my high school diploma in the summer of 2002. I went on to graduate from college and pursue higher education. It is only in retrospect that I can truly appreciate the meaning of Frost’s poem and how it guided me, perhaps unconsciously.
I still wonder, however, what kind of person would I have been, had I chosen to leave school and turn my attention elsewhere? Like Frost, I am only one traveler, and as such, “could not travel both”. In my neck of the woods, no path seems so “fair” or easy to take.
Frost was one of those poets who made me realize the existential nature of poetry; poets ascribe to freewill. I believe Frost had shaped reality into an unshakable proverb that guided my decision-making in unprecedented ways. Although I was once uncertain about my choice to remain in the school system which I was so deeply critical of, my decision allowed me to become the neuroscientist and poet that I am today. I owe this to having the audacity to choose a path which has enlightened me to the miracles of science and the beauty of figurative language-and that has made all the difference.