T.R.T
THE ROAD TAKEN
There is a famous poem written by a New England poet called Robert Frost going by the enigmatic title: “The Road Not Taken”. It was introduced to me by a high school literature teacher way back in 1965.
Somehow, it keeps coming back to me as a reminder, perhaps, of the other road that I could have taken had I allowed myself the luxury of going back as Frost was imagining. The poem got so deep into my hard disk that It used to give it to my students when, a few years later, I became a professor at the University of Nairobi.
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth....
The point in this first stanza is clear if you consider the many choice decisions you have had in your life but had to make a choice of only one because, as Frost says in the next stanza, you really cannot do both. We have a saying in my Gikuyu language “Michingu iiri yoinire hiti maguru” (two scents broke the hyena’s legs - because being the greedy animal it is, it decided to follow the two scents at the same time).
A particularly difficult decision I had was when I joined Kangaru School in Embu for my A-levels. I had to choose Arts or Science but I had a dilemma: my two favourite subjects, English and Mathematics, were different clusters. Faced with this momentous decision, I decided to take the headmaster, Mr C F Hampton, head on by insisting that I had to take BOTH subjects.
Being a reasonable teacher, and seeing I had a “1” (top score) in both subjects, he asked me to go and see the Maths teacher a left-handed fellow whose name I forgotten(Gakono, we used to call him). After explaining my problem to him, he liked my resolve and decided to alter the
rules slightly by changing the time-table so that the two subjects were taught at different times to accommodate exceptional cases.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The Actual Road Taken
As a result of that decision, when I got to university I had a similar decision to make but this time there no sympathetic teacher so I did the only logical thing I could do: choose neither Arts(where English was located) nor Maths in Science. And that is how I ended up taking the BCom degree which I knew absolutely nothing about but which changed my life forever.
As Frost concludes in his poem,
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 travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Now that I have had time to think about it, the universe has been telling me a story and I have been so busy doing that and this that I did not hear what I was being told.
Until this last weekend of June which I spent with my dear wife at our rural home in Ndakaini. I can’t say it was a nice weekend because we had gone there for my dressing down.... but that is a story for another day.
Seeing Things Clearly
Like my good Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff says, I can see clearly now that all this was happening for a reason. For, you see, I have all these short papers that I have been writing over the years and I have been wondering what to do with them so they can become the book that I have been wanting to write all these years.
I now have a clear picture of how I want to proceed. Based on a model of a book by Wayne Dyer ‘I Can See Clearly Now’. In retrospect, I know that each of the pieces I did was written based on a very strong feeling on a subject I had when I wrote it.
Upon rereading some of them recently I realized that they tell most of my life’s story. The only thing I have to do is to give them a connectivity link and, bingo!, I can even have a book out by the end of the year. And I may even have a ready publisher - Hay House in LA where I spent some part of my life.
Time to get to work. The title of the first book: “The Road Taken”. Connectivity links: With Hindsight, Looking Back, In Retrospect..... depending on the topic.
JH Kimura,
Nairobi,
2nd July 2019
Several months later, it occurred to me that I might be using someone else’s book title. Then, on googling, I found out that there were, in fact, many books by my chosen title. I might be accused of plagiarism or copyright breach.
Then I realised that you can't be accused of those sins simply because you used the same three English words. It's only if you use the author’s name that you will erring.