The Less-Traveled Life

On my hike today I can choose the ridge route or the one that follows the stream.

I can choose the rough and tumble one, the dusty one with risk of slipping down a deserty California hill or I can choose the one with very slight up-hills and easy down-hills.

The first one is hilly and hard and daunting. I look it up and down and I hate it already.

The second one is shady and winding and it really is easy. I could even stroll it if I choose. And it’s the more populated one. It’s the one with the families and dogs and jogger strollers. It’s the one with cross country teams running for their personal bests.

The ridge route is peppered scantily with hikers, with guys with walking sticks and with people with wide-brimmed hats to shield the summer sun. Congregations of boot-campers, rattlesnakes and mountain lions all worry me there on the less traveled trail.

I don’t want to be an English class cliche, but the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason. Robert Frost claims they look very similar but I know differently. They might begin the same {both of my canyon hikes begin at the parking lot} but as they move forward they look very, very different.

One is calm and shady. The other is hot and defiant.

But the best things in life do not come challenge-free. The best of the best comes with hard work, with pain, with grief and loss sometimes and always with risk.

Always with risk.

The reason why we are fat and addicted and lazy is we are conditioned to cocoon ourselves with comfort and safety. Food tastes good. Television looks good. Naps feel amazing. We are not conditioned to challenge ourselves.

We wonder why we live in ruts and routines? We want our lives to change? We want to accomplish something?

We don’t because we don’t set out for the difficult and for the challenging. We stay comfy and cozy in the easy and well-traveled. People who do big and great things have done hard things and their route is not well-traveled.

I promised myself years ago when I began hiking that canyon that whenever I made it to the top I would stop and look around. I would NOT simply continue to go. I would reap the gift of taking the hard path because from the top I can see the mountains, the city and the sea.

So I do stop and I breathe in the reward. I breathe out the challenge and the pain and I take in the ocean and the rest of it. And then the hurt and risk don’t seem so great when I can sit and rest in the gift.

Today, let’s take a less-traveled road. Each of us. Let us all choose something with which to challenge ourselves. Let us hike the hard, uphill, risky ridge route today.

I promise, the view is worth it.

Do you need to challenge yourself today? What is your less-traveled road?

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.