I listlessly deleted unimportant emails and paused to reread an important one. One of my coworkers’ sisters died. It was the second death of a relative of a friend that I received this week. I glanced at the empty walls of my office. Out the window, I could see blue sky. The cold rain had passed and it was sunny and warm for the first time in ages. There wouldn’t be much more productive work today.

On my way home, I stopped and took a brief walk around the Wesleyan campus. A group of students gathered on one section of lawn, perhaps it was a theatre class. On the labyrinth a handful of students stood in a semi-circle singing madrigals. On the grass around the labyrinth a larger group of students sat listening intently.

I had once sat on lawns like these, listening to friends perform. Those were care free days. Sure, I had my struggles as did my friends around me. I knew of the greater struggles in the world, but only abstractly.

In my senior year of college, one of the best classes I took was on Virginia Woolf; five hundred pounds and a room of one’s own. Of course that five hundred pounds, converted to current U.S. Dollars is about two thirds the price of a year at Wesleyan. How many of the students sitting on the lawn around the labyrinth had daddies who could provide them with the modern equivalent of five hundred pounds and a room of their own? From such a perch would they be able to see enough of the human condition to write great novels?

Yet it wasn’t A Room of One’s Own that came to mind as I strolled across the Wesleyan campus. No, the words that came to me were, “What a lark! What a plunge!” Yes, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would but the flowers herself.”

I thought of my friends who had recently lost relatives. I thought of the economic and health disparities in our country and the armed conflict around the world. “The war was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft … “

How does one hold all this in one’s mind, the beautiful spring day with the college students gathered around friends singing beautifully, the suffering of friends who had lost relatives, the daily struggles of the overlooked poor? Perhaps writing would help. Perhaps it helped Virginia Woolf, but was it enough?

I returned to my car and continued my commute home. Traffic on the Parkway was heavy, so I took the back roads. Switching roads and switching writers, I found myself on a road less traveled. Not two paths diverging in the woods, but getting off the parkway for the local roads. Yet, for me, like Robert Frost, that has made all the difference.

So now, I am home, having had a quick dinner. Next, I will head off to bed, for tomorrow will also most likely be another long day.