Last night I found myself going to my bookshelf—one of those small, instinctive moments where you’re not really searching for a book so much as you’re searching for a feeling, a memory, a piece of yourself. And as I stood there running my hand along the spines, I realized something:
The older I get, the more I find myself drawn to people who didn’t have an easy road.
Maybe that’s because my own life hasn’t been a straight line either. Maybe it’s because when you’ve lived through enough loss, enough confusion, enough nights where you sit alone wondering how you got here… you develop an instinct for others who carried more than their share.
That’s what draws me to Robert Frost.
On the surface, Frost seems like the poet of quiet woods and stone walls—gentle New England imagery, simple rural life. But the truth is, he was a man walking through a lifetime of heartbreak. And I don’t mean the occasional storm. I mean a relentless series of losses that could have emptied him out completely.
A father who drank himself into an early grave.
A childhood uprooted.
Children who died in his arms.
A wife whose death shattered him.
A son lost to suicide.
Mental illness that threaded through his family like an old curse.
And yet—this is what astonishes me—he kept creating.
He kept finding meaning in the smallest things: the crunch of snow, the bend of a birch, the moment two paths diverge in the woods. Somehow, the tragedies didn’t flatten him; they deepened him. They didn’t silence him; they sharpened his voice into something unmistakable.
And I suppose part of why Frost fascinates me is because I understand, in my own way, how life can carve you. How circumstances you never asked for can shape the way you see the world. How pain can make you quieter, more observant, more aware of the spaces between things. How it can leave you with a kind of sensitivity that other people—people untouched by real loss—may never fully understand.
When I read Frost, I don’t just see birch trees. I see someone holding himself together with words.
Someone choosing to walk forward even when the road was steep.
Someone whose genius didn’t come from comfort but from scar tissue.
And I guess that’s what I recognize: the instinct to take something difficult—something lonely, something heavy—and try to make sense of it. Not through self-pity, but through clarity. Through discipline. Through the hard work of seeing life exactly as it is, not as we wish it to be.
There’s a line in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” that always hits me harder than the rest:
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”
That’s the honesty of a man who has stood in darkness long enough to understand its beauty—its pull. But then he adds:
“But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
That’s the part that feels like life itself. Not the easy life—the real one. The life where you keep going because people are counting on you. Because there is work left to do. Because quitting is the one thing you never allowed yourself.
Sometimes I think genius isn’t a gift—it’s a decision.
It’s the choice to look inward instead of away.
To take the hard things you’ve survived and turn them into something that resonates with other people.
Frost did that.
He made art out of ache.
He turned his grief into understanding.
And that’s why I keep reading him.
Because he reminds me that the things that wound us can also refine us.
That tragedy can force a kind of depth you don’t get any other way.
And that even in the darkest woods, there is still the possibility of meaning—if you’re willing to see it.
The Valley Viewpoint 