The Poet's Desk VI: Fork in the Road

lady

This 'parable' was written as a final project
for a class in university. I rediscovered it
several years later and couldn't bear to
discard it.
je

VI. Fork in the Road
A Parable for Today

   A man came to the end of his journey and stood at a fork in the road. As
   it was the end of his own particular journey, he chose to go neither to the
   left, nor to the right, but remained where he had arrived by the fork in the
   road.

   He had travelled many long, weary and sometimes hopeless miles only to
   discover that the beginning of his journey had already been the end in itself,
   and had simply been replayed in many different settings at different times.
   He had never really left the fork in the road, but had actually been there all
   along, right in the middle where the two roads met. Slowly a smile of
   contentment spread over his face, and he sat down.

   Soon a youth arrived at the same fork in the road, but his journey was
   only beginning. The boy said, 'Pray, Father, can you tell me which is the
   right path to take?" for he thought he recognised wisdom in the face of
   the fellow traveller.

   "Both ways and no way, neither this one nor that," replied the older man.
   "Is that why you are sitting here? Are you resting because you don't know
   which way to go?" asked the boy.

   "I am sitting here because I have already gone both ways and no way,
   and they have brought me back to his very same fork in the road. Now
   that I have arrived once more, I realise that I have never really been
   away."

   "But how do I know which way to go?" the boy asked pleadingly. "For I
   have gone neither way and am just beginning my journey. I have great
   expectations for the future and no time to waste. I do not wish to make a
   mistake so early in my quest."

   "All roads are the same, my son, it is the baggage you accumulate that
   changes and becomes different. Since you are the road, you shape the
   road – the road does not shape you. Your circumstances have only as
   much power over you as you allow them to have. If you never go any
   further in life than this fork in the road, you can find all the things which
   you desire and are so earnestly seeking. Soon you would see that . . ."

   "If you're not going to help me," interrupted the boy, "you needn't make
   fun of me as well. I shall find my own way, by myself." Angrily the boy
   started down the left road, muttering to himself about people and shapes
   of roads and worthless old men.

   Slowly the youth vanished into the gathering darkness, and as he went,
   his equally dark thoughts cluttered and clanged and rained down on the
   road around him like so much refuse and debris.

   Had he looked back, just for an instant, he might have caught a glimpse
   of the old man as he melted into the dust of the fork in the road, leaving
   behind nothing but a worn out, well-travelled pair of shoes, and the almost
   audible sigh of a soul that has become one with the beginning and ending
   of all stories.

Jane Ellen