I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar

Thoughts from a woman who is somewhere between the "Sex and the City" and "Golden Girls" stage of life.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The Road Not Taken--YET!

As I approach my 40th birthday, I am becoming more aware of who I really am. I am getting to know my true self, not the person everyone else think that I am. I also feel many changes happening inside myself. Some are voluntary, and some are not. I have looked back at the young girl I once was, and I no longer recognize her. I am not the same person. In some ways this is a good thing--I have developed into a much stronger and confident woman than I expected I would become. In other ways, I am wanting to recapture some of the positive things from my youth. I cannot go back and relive my younger days, but I can try to find ways to apply my lost goals and dreams toward my future. I am discovering that some lost opportunities of my youth can possibly be recaptured in midlife. These opportunities may appear in a different form, but the general idea behind them remains the same. Years ago, I chose to follow a certain path in life and never looked back. As in Robert Frost's famous poem, there was "a road not taken." Now I am realizing that it is possible to find a place where those two roads once again intersect. I am once again trying to decide which road to choose. I cannot make a U-Turn and go back down the previous road, but I CAN merge into traffic on this new road that I previously did not choose. I am now ready to explore the road that I did not take back then. Life is full of opportunities, and sometimes you can travel down several different roads within the same lifetime. Sometimes the road not taken is really just the road to take later on in life. Maybe we could call it "the road not taken YET" or "the road to take at a later time." I am currently searching my "road map of life" for places to explore in the future. I am getting very excited about the adventure that lies ahead!