"The road of life can only reveal itself as it is traveled; each turn in the road reveals a surprise." Anonymous

This was my weekend message on my desk calendar. It was quite appropriate to the train of thought I’ve been having over the last days. I have several high school and college aged people in my life.Perhaps it is because of them, their conversations, their struggles, that I have been thinking about what path we expect our lives to take when we are younger. Most often as I gather with friends, conversation shifts instead to the surprises our lives have taken, how what we thought we might be doing at ‘our age’, is quite different than what we are actually doing. Through twists and turns, unexpected opportunities, successes that didn’t seem possible and what seems like sheer luck, we find ourselves living a vocation that we would never have imagined at twenty. Doors opened….and often doors closed…..and here we are.

It is the door closing part that most fascinates me. I think of the doors that have closed for me in my life, how devastated I was, the tears that were shed, the angry words I flung into the air, the ‘why me?’ and the ‘how could they?’ shouted at deaf ears. And yet now, as I look back, it is the closed doors that have made the biggest difference, that have led me to right place, at the right time, walking the road it seems I was called to travel.

Over my life I have witnessed people I think of as great, have doors closed on what they believe to be their ‘road.’ Jimmy Carter, Maya Angelou, Al Gore, to name only three. And yet as the door closed, they have been led to perhaps the ‘surprise’ of something different they were called to do in their lives. Habitat for Humanity, Author, Poet, An Inconvenient Truth………

What doors have closed in your life? What doors have opened as a result? What surprises have been revealed to you on the road you have traveled so far?

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;
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 feet 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 travelled by,
and that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost