On Mistakes & Paths
Children’s literature takes me back to a simpler place and time. Though the language is simple, the stories themselves are often imbued with some of the most profound life lessons I’ve ever learned.
“It has been a long trip,” said Milo….”but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn’t made so many mistakes. I’m afraid it’s all my fault.”
“You must never feel badly about making mistakes,” explained Reason quietly, “as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”
“But there’s so much to learn,” [Milo] said, with a thoughtful frown.
“Yes, that’s true,” admitted Rhyme; “but it’s not just learning things that’s important. It’s learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters.”
-Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth, (added emphasis mine)
In this scene from The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo is returning from his quest to find the princesses Rhyme and Reason. Though he has succeeded in rescuing the princesses from the Castle in the Air, at the conclusion of his journey, Milo feels like he has failed. He is acutely aware that even for what he has accomplished, it has taken him much longer than he intended to complete the tasks. Milo surmises that, in the end, the mistakes he made along the way took him away from a path that he should have walked instead, a path that would have allowed him to complete his quest sooner.
I feel you, Milo.
Much of my life is a divergence from how I thought it would go, or where I thought I’d be, but most especially by when I would be there. This time last year, I honestly expected to be moving to California for graduate school this fall, yet here I am still on the east coast. I used to make 5 year plans when I was in college, and I had it all planned out. Back then, I sincerely thought that I’d not only be married but would have children (plural!!) by the time I was 28 years old. Suffice it to say that that looks extremely unlikely right now, nor does that plan make sense anymore given where I am in life at the moment. This is why I stopped making 5 year plans. Every time I have made one, I have just gotten things so laughably wrong that I don’t even make them anymore. I used to try to plan for things that stubbornly resisted being put on a calendar. Then I would get down on myself for not achieving or accomplishing those things. It was a mess.
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…
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.-“The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost, (added emphasis mine)
I love this poem, but upon reflection, I realize that Robert Frost never actually said whether taking the road less traveled by was a good decision. He just said that it made all the difference. The rest, we read into. We assume that the difference it made in his life was positive. Had he chosen the other fork in the road, where would he be?
For me, entrepreneurship has epitomized what living a countercultural life looks like. Taking the road less traveled by is a decision that has to be remade every single day. In my imagination, the two paths in Frost’s forest diverge only but so much. That is to say, it is still possible to view the alternate path from the path less traveled by, and therefore possible to second guess one’s decision to take the less-traveled path at many turns.
Taking the less traveled path also has implications for my faith. In the Bible, Jesus also talks about two divergent paths. In this chapter, Jesus instructs me to:
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
-Matthew 7:13-14 (NIV)
For these paths, not only is the (presumably) less-traveled path narrower, it is also difficult to find. Which implies that we not only have to walk the path that leads to life, but we have to possibly do the advance work of searching for it, maybe even creating it for ourselves.
Which reminds of another of my favorite poems, also themed around paths:
“Caminante, son tus huellas / Wanderer, it is your footsteps
el camino, y nada mas / that make the path, and nothing more
Caminante, no hay camino / Wanderer, there is no path
Se hace camino al andar…” / you make the path as you walk…-Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares XXIX, (my translation from Spanish)
To be an original, or to travel along an original path in life, we have to create the path before we can walk it. This frequently feels uncomfortable, or like a mistake, or like it is taking too long. Like Milo, I look back and wonder what would have happened if I had not been so committed to following a path off the beaten track. And with my imagined rendering of Frost’s two divergent paths, it’s still possible to catch glimpses of where the other path leads. For me, those glimpses of the other path show graduate school. Degrees on degrees. The Forbes 30 under 30 list. The accolades go on. I see that path, and I know I’m no longer on it.
Choosing to live a life that aligns with my values frequently feels like a rebellion. I hold nothing against accolades or academic degrees, but the commitment I have made to myself is to continue to use my time to live thislife, to walk this path, the path that I am on right now. Far from second guessing my choices in life, I choose to recommit to them as I make my way onwards. My mistakes are all part of that path. My footsteps make the path. They may have taken me in a direction that is not the one I could have envisioned for myself years ago, but I am still here. I am where I am in life for a reason; I need only continue to forge my path forward.