The great poet Robert Frost,
In his poem The Road Not Taken,
Painted a hopeful and bucolic scene of a man finding two paths in a wood and choosing to take the one less used.
The idea is that the rarity and uniqueness of the untaken path was positively transformative,
A reminder that we should take the unbeaten road from time to time.
My dear friend,
Kindred Spirit,
My sister from another mother,
Developed tumors and several other signs of cancer a few weeks ago.
Her doctor said that she was at a much greater risk for multiple types of cancer and needed testing and a biopsy as soon as possible.
She is in her thirties,
Has several children,
And the youngest just started school not long ago.
I knew what I had to do was approach this with patience and grace and find a way to accept whatever the outcome might be.
I believe there is a reason for everything,
Even the worst we can imagine,
And I needed to open my mind,
Still myself,
And believe I could find some enlightenment in the darkness.
What I actually did was cry,
A lot,
Imagine every worst-case scenario like a set of deadly highways and I took each of those highways as far as my panic could fuel them.
I found that the reason for this was any number of punishments that she or I or the two of us had to suffer.
I closed my mind in a tight circle of panic and I ran around that circle until I wore that shape into my head.
Then I hit the wall.
I ran out of energy waiting for results and trying as hard as possible to not show my panic to my friend.
I'm normally a solitary person.
When my panic won me over,
I thought,
This is what happens when you have relationships.
It wouldn't happen if you were alone.
My Robert Frost moment.
I had no intention of giving up on my friend,
No matter what.
I would be there for it all.
But my brain still went to that place where it created two paths instead of one.
A reminder that I could immediately stop my panic and worry about the situation by stepping on to a different,
Easier,
Simpler,
Less complicated,
Less messy path.
I have always figured that if something is hard,
You look for the easier solution.
If something is hard,
You study it until it isn't.
If something is hard,
You wait until it thaws.
If you have a difficult and hard goal,
Break it down so you can accomplish it in pieces.
Always look for the thing that helps you avoid having to live through the hardness.
But my friend might not be able to break down cancer into easier pieces.
If she doesn't have cancer,
She still has a hard path to go to figure out what is happening.
This isn't a story about my friend dying or being hit by a car and how I coped with it.
But as someone who is solitary by nature,
Investing in relationships and honestly connecting in a meaningful way was a serious life change for me.
Having connected and invested,
I was now having emotions that were awful,
Painful,
And foreign.
Cutting and running was a knee-jerk thought.
Two roads diverged in the situation for me,
And I made my choice.
I sat on the floor and said over and over again,
I'll take the hard road.
Being solitary allows me to not have to feel the horrible emotions.
If you're by yourself,
You don't have to care or love other people in the worst of times.
I sat and said repeatedly to God,
The spirits,
The Flying Spaghetti Monster,
That I would voluntarily take the hard road and feel all that was bad in the situation.
The easy road shows you what you are capable of doing,
Breaking things down into more manageable pieces,
Avoiding hot spots,
Basic troubleshooting.
Taking the hard road showed me that I had no faith whatsoever that I could do this.
I didn't understand this path,
I didn't want this road,
And I wanted to get off it immediately.
But my best friend was walking that road alone,
With no certainty that it would lead anywhere good.
I didn't want her to be alone,
And the hard road taught me that if being her friend during this time meant that she was going to be on the hard road,
Then I wanted to be wherever she was.
Members of studying language taught me that the road less traveled holds delights and wonders.
The past few weeks have taught me that the hard road tells you who you are and,
More importantly,
Who you're willing to be.
None of what I learned holds a candle to what my friend has gone through recently.
But now I know that if her candle goes out,
I will give her mine.
And she now knows that too.
And that has made all the difference.
