Roads to Travel

There’s an oft-quoted poem by Robert Frost called the Road Not Taken about a man who is traveling in a forest and comes upon a fork in the road. He then has a choice – he can take the path that seems to be safer, well-trodden, or he can choose the road less traveled, grassy and without a well set path.

He takes the path less traveled, thinking that he can take the well-traveled road another day – but by the end of the poem, he realizes that he can’t go back on his choice, because one choice leads to another, and time passes quickly. He remarks at the end that this particular choice in his life got him to where he is today, and that “it has made all the difference.”

A year ago, I chose instead of applying to law school as was part of my master plan, to join the Peace Corps, and to me, it most certainly seemed like the road less traveled. Yet, there’s a part of me that constantly thinking back to how things would have been different had I decided against the Peace Corps, and just went directly to law school.

The person I am today is certainly different than the person I was a year ago – I recently just came back from a conference in Almaty and met up with a group of other volunteers from Kaz-17 to reflect on the first year and plan for the second. Much of our discussion was on future plans, and what to do next after Peace Corps. One of the most interesting aspects for me personally was that many of the volunteers remarked on how much they feel like I’ve changed – they told me that I’m much more confident and sure of myself than I was when they first met me a year ago.

In some ways, I definitely do feel that – my Russian is pretty good now, I have little fears about teaching English, and now I’m just generally enjoying my life here in Kazakhstan. In many ways, the feeling has carried on to make me feel more sure about what I want to do in the future – that is, travel more, and perhaps consider living and working abroad.

But again, after a year here in Kazakhstan, once again I’ve come to another fork in the road – do I start applying to law school now as part of the master plan? Or is there a part of me that still feels like I want to take that road less traveled once more? One of my fellow volunteers happened to mention that she was interested in going to Japan to teach English for a year after the Peace Corps, having fallen in love with doing such work, and immediately, the thought came into my mind, and I imagined myself in Japan or Korea, doing something I presently enjoy doing, living a modest life, feasting on regional cuisine, and learning a new language that I’ve always wanted to learn.

After all, if I can adapt to a country like Kazakhstan in a year, how hard could it be for a place like Korea?

One of the consistent thoughts (at least, from my perspective) that plagued me for the past year was this consistent pressure to ‘hurry up and finish my work here so I can get back to my real life.’ This is a view that I’m fairly sure my parents (and probably a good number of my friends) hold for me – that these two years of my life out here in Kaz are nothing more than wanderlust, and that I’m essentially putting my life on hold because I’m not in the states, getting on with my real life.

Oddly enough, sometimes locals feel that way too – a close friend that I dated here for awhile decided the same, that my real life was in the states, and that to stay away from the states for too long – whether for study, working, or hell, even for love, was a bad idea because sure, I could say at the moment that I’m loving this life and I want to continue living this way, who knows how I would feel in a year?

But then it hit me: this IS my real life. Every moment that I’m living is ‘real life’, and regardless of when I return to the states, these experiences are all apart of that. For anyone to say anything different is nothing more than a lack of understanding of my experience and at worst, ignorant. It’s no different if I had told a friend who decided to work for 2-3 years before going to grad school that he had better hurry up and enter before his ‘real life’ gets away from him.

When I was down in Almaty, my father had called me and basically went nuts when I expressed the possibility of staying abroad for another year teaching English, perhaps in Korea or Japan, stating that there were no other options but to continue going to school, otherwise I’d face the disappointment of the dreaded ‘family’. I lamented that evening to my fellow volunteers, whom of which all seemed to have families that more or less supported their decision to go to the Peace Corps, and basically had the freedom to do whatever they wanted afterwards with full support of their families. Maybe it’s the immigrant family thing? I don’t know.

Still, there are times that I find myself wishing that I had already finished grad school before doing this – I’ve witnessed more than one volunteer who had long finished grad school who met the love of their life here and eventually made the big plunge and got married. I know countless others who went back to the states to finish school, trying to manage a long distance relationship in the meantime.

But the whole love question is just one aspect. Had I finished grad school already and did this, I’d feel freer to stay behind an extra year or continue working abroad or doing whatever I wanted. But the inherent problem is just that – as much as I want to rebel against taking the well-paved road and do what my hearts wants me to do, there is indeed the voice that I hear that goes “you can’t do anything until you finish school…” ugh.

The interesting part of the poem “The Road Not Traveled,” though, is that he doesn’t remark on whether the difference was necessarily better or worse than if he had taken the road well traveled instead. Though the poem is often interpreted to inspire people to take less traveled paths, a close reading of it doesn’t seem to present the road less traveled as necessarily better… the road I chose a year ago has made all of the difference, and I don't regret it for a second... but what of future roads? It seems that in the end, the most important thing is to make a decision and make the best of it.