Tag: Robert Frost

Two Paths in the Woods, Pt 2. Beyond Symbolic and Poetic Words By Guest Author Anthony Marsella

Posted on by kathiemm
Another nuclear accident? Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. By Dr Lesley Morrison.

 

The path we choose in our lives is not merely a symbolic or poetic path — one presented so eloquently by Robert Frost’s image of worn and less-trodden paths at a fork in the road.   No! The path before us is an essential life-nurturing and sustaining path and each person must choose to renounce violence, destruction, war, and killing. In each of our daily habitual actions, we are making moral choices regarding the survival of our planet.

Humanity is at the point of extinguishing countless life forms and expressions. We engage in an unbridled assault upon each other and upon the natural world. Our appetites for destruction are endless in virtually every realm of our lives — economic, political, social, educational, and moral. Our global condition is well–known, and yet we are oblivious to the dangerous consequences of actions we are supporting. These facts are most visible in the United States of America, a nation once symbolized as a “beaming light-on-the-hill.” It is now  a nation whose policies and actions — whose “choices” — are characterized by corruption, cronyism, exploitation, violence, inequity, prison population disproportions, and the sins of affluence (e.g.,  lobbyists, hypocrisy [hypocracy], contempt for citizen rights and participation [demonocracy], and slow deaths by obesity, malnutrition, racism, classism, poverty). We can do better.

The mass media, a potential voice for informing and educating citizens is a participant in destruction. Analyses of critical news events become opportunities to defame the “other side” — whatever that may be! Receptive audiences choose to watch and to listen to media supporting their existing views. Minds become closed to doubt and fall prey to gossip, calumny, half-truths, entrapment, stereotypes, falsehoods, and misrepresentations. We can do better.

*Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii. Dr. Marsella’s essay was originally published by Transcend Media Service at https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/10/two-paths-in-the-wood-choice-of-life-or-war/ . We will publish excerpts from it intermittently over the next few months.

Two Paths in the Wood: “Choice” of Life or War, Part 1

Posted on by kathiemm

“Choice:” Poetic, Personal, and Political from guest author Dr. Anthony Marsella.*

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both. . . .  Somewhere ages and ages hence,
Two roads diverged in a wood,
And I . . . And I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference. 

Robert Frost, Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet (1874-1963)

Literary critics have written a lot about this popular Robert Frost poem. All seem to agree that the essence of Frost’s poem is the importance of “choice” in the absence of any knowledge of possible consequences the making of an important decision without knowing the likelihood of the outcomes. This decision requires the willingness to choose, based on personal confidence, trust, and, perhaps more than anything else, courage.

Critics suggest Frost expressed in his poem that there was no better path, but rather that “choice” is our daily reality Choice is always present. Choice is inherent in the nature of human life, and forms the basis for individual and social morality. Unlike other species that rely on reflexive, inborn fixed-response patterns, humans have the capacity for choice, although there may be little conscious awareness of this special capacity. As life unfolds, the consequences of our choices reveal the wisdom (i.e., fulfillment, satisfaction, comfort), and/or regrets (i.e., remorse, penitence, guilt, trauma) of our life.

I chose Frost’s poem as a departure point for a choice all humans face at this time in our world; in my opinion, the choice is between endless war or nurturing and sustaining life. Here I could substitute the word “peace,” but I am uncertain at this point what peace means. People, societies, and nations use the word peace with impunity to benefit their own needs, rather than as a source of mutuality, an enduring condition in which violence, destruction, and war are refused. Enough!

I am asking for a world free of strife, suffering, agony, and endless pain and grief. The apocalyptic horses are exacting their legendary tolls of poverty, famine, disease, and war, amidst threats of extinction, disposable lives, and the exhaustion of natural resources. We are living in the Anthropocene Era  (age) in which human behavior, shaped by choice, is the dominant force that shapes our world’s survival. The two greatest capacities of humanity — consciousness and conscience—have yielded to denial and avoidance in favor of reflex and impulse. Cui Bono?

 *Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii. Dr. Marsella’s essay was originally published by Transcend Media Service at https://www.transcend.org/tms/2014/10/two-paths-in-the-wood-choice-of-life-or-war/ . We will publish excerpts from it intermittently over the next few months.