Walking The Path Less Travelled

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

This morning I’ve been questioning how negative the world needs to get in order for people to turn inwards and heal their soul. All I see ‘out there’ is people living in a perceptual state of victimhood, blaming government and ‘elites’ for the problems in the world. It’s unfortunate that making impactful change in the world doesn’t work with an unconscious foundation of victimhood.

Rarely considered is that by definition, the crowd and it’s level of consciousness cannot make any individual happy or fulfilled. The collective can only ever be an idea – it is only a concept, and it isn’t concrete.

Meaning

The only way to give life an authentic sense of meaning is to step away from the crowd and walk the path less travelled. Your own path that reveals itself when you have built up the courage to step away from the herd and become an individual.

It takes courage and a walk alongside uncertainty to become who you are in a world that despises individual greatness.

Let’s finish with Robert Frost’s famous poem – The Road Not Taken.

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.

Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken

Walking The Path Less Travelled

Meaning

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