The Road less travelled

Robert Frost (1874-1963). Mountain Interval. 1920.

1. 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; 5

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, 10

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. 15

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.


This book helped me.
The Road Less Travelled published in 1978, by M Scott Peck, his best-known work, and the one that made his reputation. It is, in short, a description of the attributes that make for a fulfilled human being, based largely on his experiences as a psychiatrist and a person.
In the first section of the work Peck talks about discipline, which he considers essential for emotional, spiritual and psychological health, and which he describes as "the means of spiritual evolution". The elements of discipline that make for such health include the ability to delay gratification, accepting responsibility for oneself and one's actions, a dedication to truth and balancing.
In the second section, Peck considers the nature of love, which he considers the driving force behind spiritual growth. The section mainly attacks a number of misconceptions about love: that romantic love exists (he considers it a very destructive myth), that it is about dependency, that true love is the feeling of "falling in love". Instead, Peck argues that "true" love is about the extending of one's ego boundaries to include another, and about the spiritual nurturing of another.
The final section describes Grace, the powerful force originating outside human consciousness that nurtures spiritual growth in human beings. To do so he describes the miracles of health, the unconscious, and serendipity-phenomena which Peck says:
nurture human life and spiritual growth
are incompletely understood by scientific thinking
are commonplace among humanity
originate outside conscious human will