The Road Unseen

I’m a planner. I have been for most of my life, citing examples like when I procrastinated and failed on my final project for seventh grade science as lessons in what happens when one doesn’t plan. My sister insists my compulsion to plan started well before that, though, when I insisted on having an itinerary in place for otherwise informal visits with my grandmother on Sunday afternoons.

The planning goes for macro- and micro-scales, from living most days by a to-do list whether I’m officially working or not, to envisioning longer scheme plans like when I decided about three and a half years out that I would, in three and a half years, leave my office job in Baltimore to pursue my MFA in creative writing at the best program that would have me. To having at times, written most of this blog nearly two full years out with posts scheduled, leaving blanks for specific holiday-themed posts I expect I’ll feel more in the spirit to write when those days are looming closer.

I know that planning to such degrees can drive some people crazy, and I’ve learned to temper my planning so that it more often than not only affects me—a personal challenge, and one that has involved more than just stepping outside my comfort zone, but more meaningfully changing how I live my life because it’s a life so intertwined now with not only friends, co-workers, and family I see a couple times a year, but a wife and son a I now share pretty much every day with.

There’s a certain kind of beauty wrapped up in not knowing what’s next or how things will turn out, though. Because even though I knew I wanted to be in a loving relationship, and ideally one day marry, I didn’t see Heather coming. Truth be told, one of the first nights we hung out socially (as it would turn out, very much establishing the groundwork for our first date) I had had intentions of spending the night alone, eating pizza in a hotel room, watching Monday Night Raw, and turning in early. I didn’t see Heather coming as a person, at that time, in the state of California, in the context of someone I had officially supervised until days before.

I wanted to have at least one child, but truth be told had imagined having a girl more than a boy, maybe because of some gender normative ideas about whom I’d take care of and how, and I know in part for fear that my limited knowledge of sports or tools might hamper my ability to raise a boy. I never foresaw the kind of unconditional, unsurpassable love I’d feel for someone I see so much of myself in, to the point it’s hard to imagine any child but Riley under my care.

I always intended to publish books, but thought that Meddletown, the novel I’d first drafted my senior year of high school and revised on and off for a decade to follow would be the one to elevate my career. I didn't foresee myself abandoning the project, deeming it irredeemable after all that time.

Our culture often cites Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken,” and though we tend to quite arguably misinterpret the crux of the poem—not that he chose an offbeat road that set him apart, but his choice was arbitrary, and he’d romanticize the choice later in life—the idea remains that we might peer down two metaphorical roads and make a one choice that leads to others, which leads to others on top of that.

I suppose my point is that it’s those other roads unseen that forked off the first that may be the most beautiful, if not the most important of all because we didn’t plan for them or choose them three moves ahead, but rather had to wait and see where life might take us. There’s always some level of agency in a person’s life choices and those times when we can make plans. Just the same, the road unseen awaits us down the line, no matter how many times we’ve changed it, no matter where we thought we were headed.