The Road Not Taken

This is going to be a more pensive, sad kind of post because that is how I feel some days.  I certainly don't feel sad every day or even most of the day.  But I do feel sad some days, which is to be expected.  And I think writing about how I truly feel about things - instead of painting a picture of a life lived with ease - may be one of the best ways to deal with these feelings and attempt to put them behind me. 

When people ask me how I am doing, which, as you can imagine, is the most frequently asked question these days, the best way I can sum up the experience thus far is that it feels like I am having an out of body experience.  It doesn't really feel real.  Instead it feels like something that is happening to someone else.  It's like I am looking at listings online for apartments that someone else will live in, and I am researching areas around Charlotte that someone else will visit for a weekend getaway.  It doesn't really feel like it's my life.  It feels like a string of hypothetical decisions.  Decisions like, if I had to live in Charlotte, what area would I live in?  What run club would I join?  Where would I grocery shop?  I think through all of these decisions, but it doesn't seem possible that I will be living with these decision, because I never once pictured a scenario that involved moving to Charlotte.

But, it is slowly starting to feel more real.  Experiences like signing the relocation agreement (I have a year commitment), being assigned a relocation coordinator, and making the move "Facebook official" made it feel slightly more real last week, and I had a bit of a breakdown on Friday night when talking about it with Phil.  I imagine that it will feel even more real when I go to Charlotte at the end of the month and show my mom where I will be working and walk through apartments that I may potentially call home. And then it will REALLY feel real when I buy that one way ticket to Charlotte.

Right now, I see the fork in the road ahead of me, but it hasn't quite hit me that, as Robert Frost so eloquently describes in the poem "The Road Not Taken", I am taking the road less traveled.

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 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, 1920

I have all these thoughts about the upcoming move, and I read Robert Frost's poem, and I think to myself:  I hope someday I tell the story of this move with a (happy) sigh and say that taking this road has made all the difference - or at least that it is not a road I regret taking.