In the Yellow Wood

Yesterday I saw a video of a guy explaining how life and chess are the same thing. You rarely lose because of your last move, he said. The real mistake happened four or five moves earlier. That's exactly how my regrets feel. I can point to my own moves: a city I chose over another, a door I closed because it wasn't the right time.

In "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost writes about a man in an autumn forest where the path splits in two. He looks down one as far as he can, then the other. Both are covered in fresh yellow leaves no one has stepped on. He picks one.

Years from now, he says, he'll tell the story with a sigh: he took the road less traveled, and it made all the difference.

Except there was no road less traveled. Just the one he picked, and a sigh he never explains.

I think I know that sigh. It's regret, wearing a nicer story. It's what you tell yourself so you can live with the road you took.

But would the other road really have made a difference? If what's meant to be will be, maybe he'd have ended up the same man either way. Different trees, different leaves, same person walking.

Maybe that's where life and chess stop being the same. In life, nobody calls checkmate. Zoom out far enough, and there's no winning road and no losing road, just the road you're on.

I want to believe that. But some days I still stand at the fork too long, wondering which sigh I'll end up with.