Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group

Find support with others who have gone through a traumatic experience. Whether you have chronic or acute PTSD, we are here for you.

10,127 Members
27,615 Posts
0 Online
Anxiety Disorders
/ Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group

the road not taken - meditation share

arfie
arfie

lately i have been grieving the river dreams i lost in the early domestic storms of my second parenting career. the first year of those storms were merely an interruption in the flow of those dreams. i had plans to leave the dust bowl and return to my beloved rivers after the storm passes. those river dreams came crashing down during the double funeral and the inheritance of the 3 young orphans. that particular crash and burn didn't feel too high on the list of griefs i was processing as the personal madness morphed into covidic madness.


this morning found me reviewing one of my early, pre-psychotherapy meditations. robert frost touched my soul, despite the fact that some bitch-assed english teacher forced him on me. "the road not taken" seems an appropriate theme for grieving my river dreams, even with ironic twist that my second parenting career puts me solidly on the road most travelled.


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 kept 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.

 

open discussion. no holds barred.
GrassIsGreen
GrassIsGreen
Love the poem
Community Leadermujicaptsd
mujicaptsd
I think of that Frost poem a LOT, arfie. I have for my whole life since I read it in a high school English class growing up in Latin America. I was just 17, but the civil war there had gotten so bad that I needed to use my US passport and get out. That meant leaving home 5,000 miles behind and being a solo teenager in a USA in which I was lucky to be a citizen but about which I knew zero.

I am so grateful for the roads I did somehow take. I didn't travel in any straight line when I landed as a teen alone in the USA. But one fork in the road after another somehow I bumbled into right decisions.

The road not taken, of course, is "what if I'd stayed in Latin America at 17 to ride the civil war out?" I went back in 2016 to find an answer to that question. One of my best high school buddies HAD stayed there, and he and I went out to coffee and dinner several times to compare my leaving to his staying. Bless his heart, his staying had worked out, but he totally affirmed my leaving, putting any doubts of the road not taken to rest.

Now I'm back in Latin America having retired from the USA 40 years later. Once again the question of the road not taken arises. Thanks for addressing it here.