My Yellow Wood

"Cogito Ergo Sum"

René Descartes

I think, therefore I am.

The two roads.

It looks like something out of a book of poetry, doesn’t it? A fair and bright walk on the left, bordered by an orderly landscaped lawn – alongside a darker one overhung with shady trees with their pleached branches and dismembered shreds of sunlight littering the ground. A single sign stands at the fork – a lone commandment saying ‘Thou must take the left road,’ and with an authoritarian slash of red, it tells you to clear off the right.

This is the way I take through the campus grounds when I have to walk from the lecture hall complex to seminar rooms where we have our weekly Microbiology Self-directed Learning presentation classes. I am always inwardly amused every time I arrive at that divide with the two roads unrolled before me. I wonder how many of the hundreds of people walking through this bit of real-life poetry everyday without even pausing a second to appreciate its accidental symbolism, its inadvertent demonstration of the choices we make and what those choices make us.

Always, everyone would unwittingly take the one on the left, excepting a handful of oddities, square pegs, skews of the bell curve, rogue variables… - call them what you will - who would choose the one on the right. Like me. I’m a rightie. I’m an oddity, a square peg, a skew of the bell curve and a rogue variable. I don’t know why others pick the same path as mine when they do, and I don’t think I’ll ever ask them either. But I know why I do that.

I just want to be different.

It’s like a ritual, a reminder of the person I want myself to be – kind of like how the withering of a flower signifies anitya in Buddhism, how the cross of Golgotha means Christianity, and how the golden double arch represents McDonald’s. Every time I choose the right road, I renew my oath to stand apart and celebrate my individuality, and that I need not ever do anything just because everyone else in the world is doing it. Because I want my life to be extraordinary. Because wanting it is a start.

Taking the road on the right; that choice is inconsequential.

But not pointless.



P.S. So, are you a leftie or a rightie?



Definitely a rightie,
k0k s3n w4i