the crossroads

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
~Robert Frost

Every moment we are confronted with a choice. At times, that choice presents itself in the most apparent fashion, maybe a job offer, an invitation or a challenge, and in those moments we are sometimes granted a brief awareness of how that choice functions, of consequence and death.

When something especially lucent or calamitous occurs in our life, we might dimly reflect on the chain of events that led to our attendance of that amazing moment. It defies the powers of our understanding to comprehend the factors that inspire a simple meeting between lovers, let alone the reasons why the economy crashes, or why the weather rains out one picnic and blesses another with sunshine. The intersection of causes remains a mystery because each cause has its own history, and each causal history was itself influenced by countless other factors.

All our best theories are approximate, and the calculations vast.

We are certainly aware, however, that whatever situation we inhabit today, no matter how delicate, bizarre, or banal, arrives with the marks of our previous travels and experiences. Even if the mode of calculation escapes us, the signs are all there - a dream that obsessed us as a child, the struggles we inherited from our parents, a vocation or calling, a traumatic injury that never fully healed, a fear of being alone, too many moments lost in thought.

Even though our memory might be littered with potholes and, quite honestly, fabrications, we can recognize a path through all our choices into the shape of our own present today. This is available within ourselves, if only we choose to search it.

The crossroads is neither past nor future. It is confrontation in the present moment where every choice, whether willing or not, opens new pathways for our future while casting a permanent darkness on others.

Choice, which is the ultimate test of freedom, is inextricably bound to death, loss, and change. This death occupies every moment, but like choice, our awareness of it remains vague except in moments of particular dramatic clarity, usually a physical death, a journey, or significant loss. We experience the little death in a part of our hearts that connects with the possibility, now closed forever, of what might have been.

It is here, at this crossroads of understanding, that we learn the most painful truth about life, and discover that the limit of individual consciousness is the gate to limitless possibility. For this one life that we have chosen leaves a frozen multitude by the side of the road, friendships never made, places never known, love never expressed, struggle never met.

Yet by some intricate design, the crossroads provides wisdom through its mystery. When we learn to embrace the little death, then the moment of choice loses its power to intimidate. This present moment, alive and real out of all our potential selves, suffused with lightness, shines with the brilliant fragility of a dream-like jewel.

We embrace this moment with the voracity of kamikaze pilots, bent not on the destruction of death, but the encounter of life without the coercion of fear.