Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

I was reading Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, because I’ve been looking into writing about my whys. I have a document penning down whenever inspiration hits. It has the “path of mastery”, like Dan Pink might add , the “path of impact”, where I see Andrew Ng in my mind whenever I write that, the “path of curiosity”, which is a pet I have that must be fed or else we have Jack a dull boy. There’s also the “path of making others go ooooh thats cool or thats funny” , which I can never really help myself not visiting if I trip into it.

But I realized there’s also , a perhaps memetic cousin of the “path of novelty”, the “path of the unknown”, which I realized, is kind of like Frost’s Road Not Taken !

Reading through it again, though I realized something weird. 🤔.

After the traveller,

“… looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;”

then , he takes the other and sort of justifies , that his choice,

“.. having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear;”

So yea the grass is greener, on the side the traveller chose 😀.

Though , Sort of he says later,

“Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay”

so Im not sure if I was cherry picking. Though he does famously end with ,

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

Grass is Greener origin?

I was looking this up and I dont see any references to Frost . On english.stackexchange.com 2 , I see there are 500 year old references,

A Latin proverb cited by Erasmus of Rotterdam was translated into English by Richard Taverner in 1545, as: “The corne in an other mans ground semeth euer more fertyll and plentifull then doth oure own.” (The corn in another man’s ground seems ever more fertile and plentiful than our own does.)

and many millenia old references! From Ovid , “Art of Love” (1 BC)

“the harvest is always richer in another man’s field.”

So Frost’s traveller …

Is he saying, nevermind being unsatisfied, lets just go to where the grass is greener and be done with it.

I wonder what Alok Kanojia5 would say here. What is chasing the unknown. I guess the Latin phrases about corn husks and grain are more about the Ego comparing yourself to your neighbor, but if you are talking about hiking and life hiking, –haha lets call this life hike as opposed to a life hack–, if its between you and the abyss, where , you look as far as you can , but you dont see around the bend and can only know if you disturb those leaves and the grass, then yea that feels like a deep inner itch you are scratching there.

Frost, 🫡.

References

  1. Road Not Taken, Robert Frost , https://poets.org/poem/road-not-taken

  2. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/479662/origin-of-the-grass-is-always-greener

  3. https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/grass-is-always-greener

  4. Ovid , “Art of Love”

  5. Andrew Huberman and Alok Kanojia interview