NEVER TRULY LOST

In his autobiography ,'Never Truly Lost', the Australian Twentieth Century bush adventurer and business man, Paddy Pallin commented on the random decisons which led him from England to Australia and altered the course of his life.

He quoted the Australian classic Such is Life by Tom Collins and I quote it here because it does say much about life decisions.

The misty expanse of futurity is radiated with divergent lines of rigid steel

and along one of those.....you travel...

at each junction you switch right or left and on you go........

the way of your own choosing.

But there is no stopping or turning back....

another junction flashes into sight, and again your choice is made...

One line may lead through the Slough of Despond

and the other across the Delectable mountains...

but you don't know till

the cloven mists of the future

melt into the manifest present

Tom Collins wrote this in 1903 ,and this reflection on life decisions is made shortly afterwards by the great American Poet Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874–1963). Mountain Interval. 1920.

1. The Road Not Taken


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.