"If you keep exposing your mind
to positive thinking,
sooner or later
you're going to catch it."

So says the perpetual calendar this morning. It kind of reminds me of "think happy thoughts". I'm not sure what fairy tale or childhood story that is from but I think there's a lot of merit to it.

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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


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Robert Frost: The Road Taken

The poet stopped on the edge of night,
And the road through dark wound on.
Black trees arose; the wind was still;
Blind skeletal walls inched over the hill
In the mole-gray dawn.

He though of the way by which he had come,
Mastered through long years-
Tangles of form and substance, dense
Thickets past which with experience
A writer steers.

He gazed beyond the familiar night
On the reasons reason curbs-
Adjectives which say too little,
Adverbs that flare, or with dust settle
On shining verbs.

A dim house ahead, a journey completed,
Out of darkness, dawn.
The blind walls move; his words awaken
Here on the page; and the road taken
Winds on.

William Jay Smith

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Robert Frost Discovers Another Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a wood
As though in argument.
I had to keep going on one
To get to the end of a scent
That a nostril had begun,
But I picked out the no good.

What did it lead me to?
The old moose chewing her teat.
Still I’m bound to put up with Fate
Despite that aftermath.
I’d hold out for some kind of path
Under a body’s feet.

X. J. Kennedy

Any time we step out of the box, our comfort zone, our path takes a different turn. I think there are many forks in the road not just one. If Robert Frost only had one fork to stand in front of to make a choice, he should have considered himself lucky. I've had many.