A Happy Road?

Big Frank has been thinking about Frost’s “Road Not Taken” and has another way of looking at it that links with a relatively new school of thought – positive psychology: the study of well being. Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Daniel Gilbert, and Jonathan Haidt, among others have been at the forefront of this. Gilbert writes that humans have evolved and developed a great capacity to synthesize happiness. He points out that there many more ways to think about things than there are things to think about. The mind not only can choose how to think about experiences, for example, but it also can select which facts to dwell on. Reality is ambiguous: there are many ways to view it, and some are more positive than others. When thinking about past experiences we generally use these abilities to put a happy spin on past events. This is a kind of psychological immune systems that predisposes us to happiness. Ironically enough, though, what works towards the happy spin in retrospect, generally does not work looking forward. Gilbert writes: “When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that will happen later. Foresight is a fragile talent that often leaves us squinting, straining to see what it would be like to have this, go there, or do that. There is no simple formula for finding happiness, and there have been many empirical studies that show people are not very good at predicting their reaction to future circumstance. However, we do have the capacity to turn “stumbles” into happy events.

So what does this have to do with Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”? Well, keep in mind that the quote is made by the narrator with a view towards how he will view this past event in the future, many years after having faced the “fork in the road.” While, in fact, neither path was factually any different than the other – one was not chosen. The narrator then constructs a fictional treatment than imaginatively makes the chosen road into the one less traveled, to fit with his imaginative construct of what makes him happy. He sees himself as having made the right choice but distorts the one path (equally trodden as the other) into the rarely trodden one – which made him an interpret trailblazer. However, to complicate things further, keep in mind that the narrator is predicting that this path choice will have "made all the difference." That is very unlikely. What is likely is that he will in the future be able to look back on this and see it as having made all the difference! It's not the path that made the difference - it's his imagination!