Edward Thomas was born in 1878 in Surrey, England. He studied history at Oxford but believed that he would make a living by writing. He began reviewing books and became a prolific writer as well as a literacy critic.
Edward had a personal challenge in making decisions. He struggled with it in all aspects of his life. One of those struggles was a decision to become a poet. He thought of poetry as the highest form of literature but lacked the confidence to venture into this form of expression. Finally, in 1914, he ventured into poetry. But he used a pen name instead of his own.
Edward was encouraged by a friend to make the decision to venture into poetry. He and his friend, Robert, also a literary critic, were walking in the woods one day when they came to a fork in the road. Philip couldn’t decide which branch to take and fretted afterward that they had taken the wrong road.
Later, Robert was inspired by Edwards’s indecisions and decision regretfulness and wrote these words:
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And to 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 work them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked 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 had hoped his poem would somehow make Edward more decisive.
Edward suffered from two common struggles that many of us face: lack of decisiveness and post-decision regret. Both are rooted in a lack of confidence. What we don’t realize is that any decision we make supports our brain growth if we have the proper perspective. Rather than asking ourselves, “Why did I make that decision?”, we need to begin asking “What can I learn from that decision?”. Learning from the decisions we make requires regular self-reflection, a critical trait for our development. But self-reflection must be one of learning rather than one of regret.
There are two post-scripts to the stories of Edward and Robert. Edward took Robert’s poem to heart and tried to become more decisive. He decided to enlist in World War I as a result. He died in battle two years later at 39 (Maybe he was too decisive). For Robert, The Road Not Taken established him as a poet and his work as a literary critic is mostly forgotten today. And that made all the difference.
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“The percentage of mistakes in quick decisions is no greater than in long-drawn-out vacillations, and the effect of decisiveness itself makes things go and creates confidence.”-Anne O’Hare McCormick