It might have been

By one of those chance quirks of the Universe, two poems fell into my hands today: The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost, and Maud Muller by John Greenleaf Whittier – actually, this last poem has the famous lines that have remained in my mind since I first read them as a schoolgirl: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!” They encapsulate a sense of deep melancholy, of having made the wrong decision; of choosing the wrong alternative – or, who knows, maybe not the wrong one, but not the one that would have made us the happiest.

Robert Frost speaks to us about those roads that we constantly have to decide upon throughout our lives, where we must inevitably pick one over the others. And once a road has been chosen, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to return and start anew down the roads we left behind. The decisions we make will lead us down other roads that, in turn, will lead us further and further away from the other options.

As the years go by, and we have lived through all the choices we have made, perhaps we’ll look back on the road we decided to follow and, in some cases, we may think “it might have been”.