Sunday, 8 February 2015

At first sight

It doesn't take a lot to know that something is about to happen. The eyes might have been straying around out into the open somewhere. That is until the accident happens. Two pairs of eyes some in the line of sight of each other, and there you have it! Disaster strikes!
The eyes lock onto each other, refusing to let go, rather helplessly locked together, like when you accidentally have two of your fingers joined together when using super-glue.
Then comes the blood-rush! That little ticker inside the chest explodes once again, and then again, and again, telling you that
"You're officially alive now, YOU IDIOT!"
Then you struggle to break the initial gaze, the both of you, realizing that it is merely futile to do so. Then you look away, forcing your neck in another direction. Yet, each time you look around, you know for a fact that the things running in your mind are the same running in the other one's too. You look, then she looks. Then she looks, and you look again. Boom... Boom... Boom... Boom... Ahh! Beating of the heart! What pleasure it gives! Blood coursing through veins, instead of passively flowing through them. That restlessness, those second thoughts, that feeling of being uncertain, and the entire confused state of affairs! Come to think of it. Humans are stupid creatures. Confused between the two roads that diverge into the woods. One road takes you to safety. The reptilian mind. The one that wants you to survive by providing the safest possible way out of tight situations.
The other road, the one that tells you... "Damn son! You're in for one hell of a ride! No idea if you'll come unscathed on the other side, but I promise it'll be FUN!" 

When I read "The Road Not Taken", by Robert Frost, it was just another poem my classmates and I had to study to answer a bunch of random test questions. But as I recall the poem now, specially now that I haven't to answer no test-question pertaining to the poem, I realize the profoundness in those four verses. Damn! Why can't such things be told to us non-academically? But that said, had this poem not been taught the way it was, it wouldn't have stayed in the back of our minds, the way it has. And besides, our minds were rather naive back then. Our minds are still naive, even now. Maybe, just maybe, our educationists kept our mental development in mind and exposed us to profound stuff in the beginning, hoping that we'll be struck by the profoundness of what we read, in time. If that's the case, well, our educationists are a bunch of geniuses.
I'm sure they didn't put the poem into our school books thinking "Oh! This is a cool poem! Let's have the kids read it!"
They must have been thinking more in the lines of "Okay, let's put this poem in the book. Here's hoping that some one among these kids will be smart enough to make sense of this stuff."

For those of us who've forgotten the poem, here it is.....
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  


And the one less traveled by, shall be one hell of a ride, and I hope to be naive enough to choose it each time, EVERY TIME!
Thank you, Robert!

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