The Tunnel Without a Light at the End

2025-01-31 · personal

It has been a couple of weeks since my graduation and a while since I wrote pretentiously on Facebook so please, hear me out for this one. I have always been a "light at the end of the tunnel" person, and modern life as we know it provides us with enough light at the end of many tunnels in our first two decades of existence that it keeps you busy enough from thinking about this.

There was the gleaming beacon of high school graduation - it dragged me out of bed when nothing else could.
Then university semesters to conquer without unaliving myself (or anyone else's) - it kept my neurons firing.
The eternal quest for love - it kept me showering and wearing matching socks.
The hunt for employment - it forced me to play nice with society's arbitrary rulebook.

But once you check these boxes, once you've collected your achievement badges, something peculiar happens. A new flavor of existential dread creeps in - not the loud, dramatic kind that keeps you up at night, but the quiet sort that whispers during your morning coffee. Like the princess with her pea, buried under a mountain of mattresses - it's barely there, yet impossible to ignore.

Now my tunnel seems to lack its ending light. Yes, yes, I hear you - "first world problems" and all that jazz. But pause for a moment. During those silent metro rides, while you're pretending not to watch everyone else pretend they're not watching everyone else, haven't you wondered? Do any of these smartphone-illuminated faces know what they're chasing? Is there something beyond the next promotion, beyond the perfect wedding photos, beyond the carefully curated vacation stories?

And no, I'm not talking about the afterlife - that's a different game show with its own cosmic rulebook. I'm talking about finding meaning in this current episode of consciousness, in this particular arrangement we call ourselves.

The tricky thing about purpose and imagination is they're like cats in a thunderstorm - you can't coax them out when they're hiding. When they go quiet, when those childhood daydreams of flying castles and underwater cities start to fade, reality becomes a bit too... real. The world loses its shimmer, like a Netflix show that's gone on too many seasons.

I've realized I'm not a dog - I'm a cat. Dogs will come to you when they're sick, wear their hearts on their furry sleeves. Cats in my experience anyway isolate themselves they shut down and most distressingly when they think they're dying they go somewhere to die alone. I do the same not to die but getting stuck with a problem in the world then escaping from the world to try and solve it.

I think this all just goes on. I think it doesn't stop until we stop. Life phase after life phase, the illusion of understanding inevitably usurped by yet stranger problems arriving, then strangers who arrive in one's life with the solution and are no longer strangers but friends. That the only control one can ever truly maintain is whether we dance or despair when confronted with such a constant lack of control, just like Joanna Newsom sang: the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating Joy Of Life. This constant process of thinking you've got it licked, then Starting Over Again with new problems, completing the final theory of you and the world and realizing it's just the beginning of a whole new class of theories of you and the world, many of which you'll never solve. And so you say goodbye to final theories - isn't that okay?

I think it's okay: rediscovering yourself, rediscovering the world, all those basements down there, all those belfries above. Isn't it cool being remade? I'll keep walking until I can't, like all of us, off the veranda and out into the blue morning with friends I hope, and we'll find more friends and walk with them too I hope, and blunder and regroup and blunder and regroup. I hope we'll remember, I hope I'll remember that there's Beauty in it all, that we do emerge from darknesses and we're helped out of them by the authored hands of those we love more often than we scramble out ourselves.

I hope we remember that there's Beauty in it all, that we do emerge from darknesses, though we're here now, that that's enough, that we do this together, that we do this together. I think that's enough. I think that's enough, and I think that's enough.