This blog turns nine. Without your noticing, the kids grow up. Like my oldest son, who at the beginning of this year took flight and now lives his independent adult life. My son, whose birthday is August 1, same as this blog.

Joseph Campbell tells us, in the story of the quest for the Holy Grail, that the knights of the Round Table decide to enter the forest at those places where there was no path. Of course: it makes no sense to look for the marvelous or for adventure along the road everyone has traveled.

That is what has happened in my life, and I suppose it’s what happens to so many young people, like my son. We head down roads unknown to us, but it’s more interesting when we head down the roads less traveled.

All of this reminds me of Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Road Not Taken, a special text, whose real meaning escapes many readers the first time. A text about that essential freedom we have in life, to choose our destiny, and about the anguish of having to make the decision. There is a certain ambiguity in that poem about the final outcome of the decisions we make. It has to do with something I’ve always thought: it’s not that we are predestined, we are the random result of thousands of forks in fate, but in the end it doesn’t matter, because here we are in spite of those decisions or indecisions, so it isn’t worth agonizing over what couldn’t have been and wasn’t. Looking back, the decisions we made were the ones that ended up shaping us, and giving us the best and the worst in life. But at the end of this post I’ll leave you the poem, so each of you can work out your own reflections.

What matters to me is that time has passed and we’re still on the air. That’s something that makes me happy and that I’m proud of.

Just as it makes me happy to see the fruit of my relationship with my son. The road of being a father is the road less traveled. Because conceiving a child is easy; being a father is the hard part, and many prefer not to walk that road. It is arid, difficult, not free of worries, frustrations, anger and fights, but full of joys and satisfactions that in the end make up for any bad moment.

That less traveled road of fatherhood is what allowed me to take part in shaping a wonderful person. I thank my wife for letting me be part of that experience.

Happy birthday Matías, I leave you this small gift:

The Road Not Taken

BY ROBERT FROST

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.

(Spanish translation taken from here; it doesn’t do it justice, but you know what they say about translating poetry)

Dos caminos se bifurcaban en un bosque amarillo,
Y apenado por no poder tomar los dos
Siendo un viajero solo, largo tiempo estuve de pie
Mirando uno de ellos tan lejos como pude, 
Hasta donde se perdía en la espesura;

Entonces tomé el otro, imparcialmente,
Y habiendo tenido quizás la elección acertada,
Pues era tupido y requería uso;
Aunque en cuanto a lo que vi allí
Hubiera elegido cualquiera de los dos.

Y ambos esa mañana yacían igualmente,
¡Oh, había guardado aquel primero para otro día!
Aun sabiendo el modo en que las cosas siguen adelante,
Dudé si debía haber regresado sobre mis pasos.

Debo estar diciendo esto con un suspiro
De aquí a la eternidad:
Dos caminos se bifurcaban en un bosque y yo,
Yo tomé el menos transitado,
Y eso hizo toda la diferencia.