Never make a decision out of fear
George Gray is one of my favorite poems to teach. The poem is part of anthology written by Edgar Lee Masters. The Spoon River Anthology (1915) was a groundbreaking work of American poetry that offered a collection of free-verse epitaphs spoken by the deceased residents of a fictional small town called Spoon River. Masters began writing Spoon River Anthology under the pseudonym "Webster Ford," publishing individual epitaphs in Reedy’s Mirror, a St. Louis literary journal. Encouraged by the positive reception, he compiled them into a book, which was published in 1915.
The anthology was controversial because it exposed the moral failings, secrets, and disillusionments of small-town life. In one poem named George Gray, a deceased man reflects on the disappointments of his own life from the grave as he observes the image carved on his tombstone:
I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me--
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire--
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
His marble tombstone displays the image of a sailboat sitting at rest in a harbor with the sails down. He notes that this boat doesn’t picture some idyllic destination of eternal rest, rather, it is a picture of the fear-filled life he lived. Through the fictious life of George Gray, Edgar Lee Masters explores how fear—specifically, the fear of failure, pain, or disappointment—can paralyze a person and prevent them from truly living. Full of regret, George Gray, reflects on his life after death, realizing that he spent his living years avoiding risk and passion, choosing safety over experience. The poem uses the metaphor of a boat that never set sail, symbolizing how his fear of hardship led to a life of regret and unfulfilled potential.
Masters highlights the power of fear by illustrating how avoiding pain or risk also means missing out on joy, love, and purpose. George Gray’s sorrow does not stem from failure but from never having taken a chance in the first place. The poem serves as a cautionary message: fear keeps us stagnant, and in the end, we may regret the opportunities we never seized more than the failures we encountered along the way.
What does this mean for us? Life is full of fear, especially when it comes to making decisions. Perhaps this is fitting, given that the word "decide" contains the suffix "-cide," derived from the Latin caedere, meaning "to kill" or "to cut down." To decide, then, is to cut away other possibilities. As George Gray’s story reminds us, choosing love means accepting the risk of heartbreak; embracing sorrow means opening ourselves to disappointment; taking risks means facing the possibility of failure.
Yet George learns—too late—that his refusal to make the “fearful” choice resulted in a meaningless life, haunted by the torment of unmet desires. He longed for love, for courage, for adventure. But fear conquered him, and in its place, regret remained. In the end, we see that while there are many reasons—good and bad—to make or avoid a decision. Fear should never be one of them.
In other blog, I’ll discuss how to face fears in decision making. But one final note about fear. Famous director Alfred Hitchcock believed that fear is most powerful when left to the imagination. He famously suggested that it is more effective to have the "monster scratching at the door" than to reveal it outright because the unknown is often scarier than the known. Hitchcock understood that people naturally create their own worst fears in their minds, making suspense more terrifying than explicit horror—the so called “unseen terror”. Bottom line, what we fearfully imagine is almost always worse than reality.
