It occurred to me today that I like to look down the road a little bit.

My favorite Robert Frost poem is “The Road Not Taken”. I have it committed to memory, and I think that the theme and the morals in the poem are important lessons for life. One of my favorite parts of the poem is in the very first stanza, when the narrator says, “…long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth.”

In the poem, the narrator is trying to make a decision about which road to take and –prior to making the choice– the narrator wants to try to gather what information they can before making a choice. Can you relate to this sentiment? Have you ever wondered what you might be missing –or what you might be getting yourself into– by choosing to do one thing, rather than choosing a different way?

Picking one path over the other can involve, if you make the wrong choice, some serious consequences. No one wants to make the wrong choice, but when you are standing at the fork, you really have no idea which of the roads is the right one, because you can’t really know.

The situation that Frost describes in this poem, as far as the metaphor is concerned, is a tough one; we can’t ever really know what lies down a certain road unless we head down that road. That’s the actual point that Frost is trying to make. While there might be certain indicators that would suggest that one choice might be a better one than any other –for example, the paths that fewer people take often make for better choices– we make the choices on the directions that we head in life, sometimes with precious little information.

* * *

My sudoku puzzle for Friday (a few days ago), from the daily sudoku puzzle calendar that I have, was a tough one. It was so tough, in fact, that I’d reached an impasse on the thing. No matter how I looked at it, no matter what techniques I tried to employ, to figure out how to get the puzzle finished, I couldn’t see a way forward.

When it gets like this, and I get frustrated trying to figure it out, my wife will usually offer to look at the answers that are printed on the back of each of the puzzles and give me a hint. I refuse to allow her to do this, for that would be cheating.

Normally, when it gets like this, it’s a matter of me knowing that there is a certain cell on the puzzle that can only be one of two possible numbers, and I have to make a choice between choosing one number and solving the puzzle with that combination, or choosing the other number and solving the puzzle from there.

The comparison between this situation, and the Frost poem that I described above, is pretty interesting.

Part of the problem is that I fill out my sudoku puzzles with a pen, always have. If I make the wrong choice, I am going to end up with a huge mess of ink when I put the wrong number in that particular cell. I guess I could do things in pencil; if a mistake gets made, you do some erasing, and it’s like it never happened.

But, life doesn’t work like that; in life, I feel like we are all doing the puzzle in pen.

Whenever I end up getting stumped like this, I will usually write out the puzzle on a scrap piece of paper, and then I can solve the puzzle with a certain number in the cell in question, to see how far it goes. Assuming that the solution is one number or another, then you would think that, approximately fifty percent of the time, I am able to solve the puzzle on the scrap paper with the number that I choose to try out. Then, when that succeeds, I just copy the answers from the scrap paper to the puzzle proper.

Otherwise, I end up getting to a point, in trying to solve the puzzle, where I realize that my choice was the wrong one. When I figure that out, then I know that the other number was the right one –the one that I should have chosen– and I can go back to the puzzle proper with that knowledge, moving me forward.

* * *

Don’t you wish you could do that with life? Push the pause button for a moment, so you can take a peek down the road a ways, investigating whether or not one choice would lead to a better outcome than the other. Then, with the knowledge that you need, un-pause things and do what you’ve learned to be the correct approach.

I’ve been in certain situations in life where I ended up making a bad choice. Of course, I only knew that I’d made a bad choice after the whole thing fell apart, sometimes many, many steps down the road. It certainly would have been nice to look down the road a little bit.

I guess the trick is to not end up in the situation, where you have to guess, very often. For me, when it comes to sudoku, I probably only run into a guessing situation once every couple of weeks. In life, I try not to end up in guessing situations any more often than what’s absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, sometimes, it’s unavoidable.

In those situations, where you have to take a guess, you should do your best to guess well, ladies and gentlemen. According to Frost, it will make “all the difference.”