The Human Experience: The Other Side of the Tunnel

The years after I separated were like one long, slow-motion tumble down a mountain. The ground gave way. I fell some distance and then landed with a bruising thud. And then the ground gave way again.

I spent every single day of those years thinking “If I can just get through this… it’ll get easier”.

The ‘this’ changed occasionally but it was always something big and difficult and hard to repair or get past. They were crises of duration. Then, just when I had almost gotten through one, another would unfold and put me right back at the starting line all over again. There weren’t even gaps between them. There was always some asphyxiating, crushing ‘this’.

For over ten years, I never made it to the finish line of a ‘this’ even once without there already being another one to replace it. That went on for so long, I eventually forgot what it had even felt like to not be under suffocating stress.

When things go really wrong in your life, if they won’t necessarily last forever, the feeling is like entering a tunnel. It was light on the side you entered and it will be light again once you are through to the other side. It is the first of those, the memory of light, which props you up at first. The struggle is the anomaly. The light is your place. You are merely passing through something.

When the thing to ‘just get through’ stretches on and on or is strung together with other things which keep you from getting to the other side, eventually, it grinds you down.

The longer you’ve been in the tunnel, the less you can remember what it felt like before you entered it… and without that memory, the light at the other end becomes something imagined rather than familiar. The darkness is your place, and you are now trying to get past it on faith or in the hopes that it won’t always be.

In that dark middle, you have nothing to hold onto. So, you can either build something in your mind to reach for when you need it or you can lose yourself in the darkness.

Throughout my endless damn tunnel, there was one specific thing I held onto. It wasn’t a light at the end of it as much it was something on the other side of it. It was a visualization of ‘I made it’, Something symbolic of the place beyond every endless ‘this’.

It was like a stone I carried in my pocket to rub my thumb over. It was an image wholly concocted in my head as a self-soothing meditation to transform “If I can just...” into “Someday, I will have…”

That little stone was someday being in Southern California with my son. Going on a trip there together. Taking him up past Marina del Rey and then Santa Monica before cutting inland onto a road that winds its way up into the canyons where the air would be thick with the smell of eucalyptus and California summer.

I have no idea why that was the thing I held onto. I don’t remember how it started or why it became such a touchstone for me. It just did. And when things reached their hardest and worst, Jesus, I held onto it.

“Someday, that thing I can only picture now will be real. It will be me driving down the coast and it will be my son next to me. It will be the actual Pacific Ocean. And it will be a turn off at some state beach halfway to San Diego and a stop for fish tacos at some little hole in the wall we’ll both long remember.”

A few years ago, I thought that thing long imagined was about to become a reality. Summer was coming. It looked like I could swing it financially. And then COVID happened. By the time it began to abate, things were in the way. It was already fall. The school year was underway.

The trip was to be our first “real vacation” together but with it not doable for almost another year, I looked for something else. We went away to Philadelphia for a weekend. We ate big breakfasts and walked all over the place and caught a Sixers game. We ate well and slept in, and for a few days, we were away. I cherished the absolute hell out of it. I soaked it up. Drank it in.

It wasn’t Southern California, but it was a vacation away. It felt like the other side of the tunnel.

The following summer, we took a roadtrip together. 4,000 miles. We had barbecue and caught a concert and went to minor league games and went to a real state fair.

It wasn’t Southern California, but it was a real vacation and not just a weekend. And that felt even more like the other side of the tunnel.

This spring after my son hurt his leg and had to sit out soccer over spring break, we managed to squeeze in a last-minute four-day trip to New Orleans.

It wasn’t Southern California, but it was a vacation that started in an airport rather than in my old car. And that felt like the other side of the tunnel too.

This summer, my son has soccer practice straight through August. He doesn’t want to miss it. He has been training for a year in the hopes of making JV this fall. He wants to see that through. I not only understand, but he also has my full support.

With that commitment there isn’t a window all summer big enough to fit in a vacation. I could push or insist he skip soccer for a while, but he would have missing it hanging over his head. A big part of the fun of vacations is first looking forward to them and then being happy to really be away. He wouldn’t be fully in that place.

I thought once practice started, he might feel less urgency to make every practice and we might squeeze in a few days. “Maybe in August we can squeeze in a few days somewhere…” I thought.

To be honest, I didn’t think we would.

A couple days ago though, my son’s coach told the team that they would be off the last week of July. Last practice is on a Thursday. The next is a week from the following Monday. Nine days. My son has nine days.

He told me on the ride home from practice.

With neither of us having even entertained him having any time off, the news sank in comically slowly.

After a while it sank in that he was now FREE THAT WEEK.

I said “Ya know, we could maybe do something while you’re off…” without having even thought about what we could do.

He thought about it for a minute and said, “Ya know what…you’re right… we could…”.

And then the conversation shifted to other things, and we drove on for a while before he brought it back around.

“But what could we do? Where would we go?”

I knew my answer.

“We could go to Southern California…”.

“We could…”

And then we talked about where else we could also possibly go, but that was just a formality really. For both of us. It was just an exercise in thinking through a decision despite knowing you’ve already made it.

By the next morning, we had skipped right past the formally deciding altogether and leapt to “So, where are we going to stay… and what are we going to do?”

I already have a little list in mind, but truth be told, it won’t matter to me if we do nothing on it. When my son and I go away, it is never about the trip. It is about the being away together. The freedom of it. The letting go. The feeling of letting life just carry you along on the current. The joy of sharing that with someone you love who loves that feeling too.

Yesterday afternoon, I dropped my son off at his other parent’s. On the drive home, it started to really sink in for me that we’re going to Southern California.

Back when the idea of this trip first became a stone in my pocket, it was symbolic of an eventual someday when I wouldn’t be under asphyxiating financial pressure struggling to just survive. It wasn’t really about the location. It was about being out from underneath an oppressive weight and how that would feel. What mattered most about the picture were things that couldn’t be seen in it.

It wasn’t that we would be in California. It was that I wouldn’t have barely scraped together the money to get us there without having had enough to really be there myself. I would be there free from having to spend a portion of every meal calculating and recalculating what the check was going to be and where that would put the total for the trip so far and where that left balances.

In the picture, I was just there.

Not rich. Not without a finite budget we needed to stay within. Just not being choked to death by it.

To me, that was the subtext. That was the emotional heart of it. That was the ‘place’ in the picture. California was the setting but that was the place.

That first weekend away in Philadelphia, our roadtrip, our last-minute dash to New Orleans, those trips… I felt so lucky to have them. I was so grateful. They all felt like reaching that place.

In having them, I came to hold onto that stone in my pocket less tightly until I didn’t really feel myself holding onto it at all. While we hadn’t made it to Southern California, I just sort of reprocessed that idea as having been more symbolic than specific.

This afternoon though, alone in the car with the trip now a thing on the calendar, all of the emotion I rubbed into that little stone in my pocket, came back... and I wasn’t prepared for it.

These stones we carry around to get us through hard times, they’re powerful things. We need that. We need them to be.

Tunnels can seem endless sometimes. The light at the end can be dim. It can seem to never get any closer. There comes an eventual day when you step out into the light again though.

When you do, those things you carried with you – the ones you reached for when you most needed something to hold onto - they should make you well up. They should.

I always thought the other side of the tunnel was a destination. I thought of it as something like the area just beyond the finish line of a marathon. A place reached in joy and celebration inhabited only by having made it there. A place where what has been passed is now past.

Now, I think it is also a place to double over with your hands on your knees and just feel with a fullness how hard it was to get there. The exertion of it. How long it was in coming.

I’m glad I still had that stone in my pocket yesterday even if I hadn’t known it had all of this stored up energy and was caught off guard by it. It’s my energy. It’s what I polished into that porous surface over years.

At some point when my son and I are in California, I’m going to take a moment for myself and slip down to the beach.

I’m going to walk along the water’s edge until I find a stone polished smooth by the sea and I’m going to slip it into my pocket.

This trip, for me, is an exchange. Leave a stone, take a stone.

Left will be one that got me through the tunnel; taken will be the one I found on the other side.