The Road Not Taken

"Father Maximos laughed as he recalled an incident with a fellow monk at Mount Athos. 'He was always very forgetful, he claimed, but fortunately for him the moment he began to pray, the devil would always remind him of all the things he forgot to do during the day.'" ~ from: The Mountain of Silence by Kyriacos Markides

"Modern people lack silence. They no longer lead their own lives; they are carried along by events. It is a race against the clock... If your life is chock-full already, there won't be room for anything else. Even God can't get anything else in. So it becomes essential to cut something out. I'm putting it as simply as I can." ~ Paul Tournier, psychoanalyst and Christian mystic


The common obsession with career advancement, place-seeking, and the accumulation and maintenance of material goods, consumes so much time and energy. Most people have little or nothing left for themselves, their families, or God. They complain of being overworked, yet are forever looking to increase their workload by getting a promotion and a raise. Success is not utilized as a means of providing more liberty and time for reflection. Rather, with every advance, they continue to make material investments and to live beyond their means, and in debt. The work they do, from a global and historical standpoint, is almost always detrimental to the true welfare of society.

When they get home (usually late), all they want is to pacify their minds, which have been occupied all day long with largely trivial, yet highly demanding, concerns. They stuff themselves with rich, stupefying foods and drinks, crack a beer or pour themselves a glass of wine, plop down in front of the "boob tube", and watch some mindless sitcom or feel-good romantic comedy, or they watch the "news" and hear about the latest child murder or political scandal, or they turn on some nerve-wracking criminal or medical drama with ominous music and a plot replete with child rape, incest, and bone-saws cutting ligaments, or, if they pick up a book, it is some shallow pulp fiction of espionage and intrigue which they have heard told a thousand times before.

They say two relatively careless words to their spouse or child; whom they barely know, yet think they know too well. Then it's off to bed, to get up and do it all over again. And while the promise of a coming vacation sustains them in their work, when they get it they are generally under so much pressure to fill the time with enjoyments, that it goes by in a kind of blur of sensory gratifications and idle chatter; not having learned anything, they have little to say, as does the company they keep. Vast sums are exhausted, and then it's back to work!

One day they fall ill and feel like their prayers have been answered. Bedridden, they are forced to take it easy, to get off the hamster wheel and relax. At this point, they may revue their lives, full of guilt and regret. Or maybe the habit of superficiality has become so ingrained that even this is impossible for them. Then they die, wondering what went wrong.

It is rare than anyone organizes their time and resources so as to be in a position to learn about the very systems of which they are a part; about the corruption which infests nearly every aspect of the culture which they have come to trust implicitly and to see as "the real world". Attention to social causes and spiritual well-being are, likewise, entirely or near-entirely absent. And the realization of the vanity and emptiness of this way of life is held continually at bay by keeping oneself perpetually engaged and distracted with the very things which only deepen that inner void and disconnectedness to the sacredness of being.

This is a call to relax and simplify our involvement with commerce, while simultaneously intensifying and enriching our awareness of matters of true importance. It is a call to the path "less traveled by", as Robert Frost put it. But not, as Frost understood it in another poem, to a path with "promises to keep" and "miles to go before I sleep". Rather, one is invited to reflect upon the foolishness of "promises" made which only scatter our energies and spread us thin; and to regard fidelity to oneself and one's deepest voice as the only promise worth keeping. It is a reminder that there is nowhere to go; not until one has stood still enough to honor the very place where one is in this present moment. It is a call to the inward path of self-exploration and self-discovery, for that is truly "the road not taken".