This sounds funny, but I have spent almost all of my 72 years in a tunnel. That metaphor could mean many things. A tunnel metaphor typically conveys one or more meanings. The most common is one of confinement / restriction. A tunnel is a narrow path with no lateral movement. There is no choice but to go forward and one’s vision is limited to what’s directly ahead. It can also mean a journey through darkness where a temporary passage is made through difficulty or uncertainty. The classic “light at the end of the tunnel” is when hardship finds an eventual resolution. The metaphor is used heavily in medical, recovery, grief, and crisis contexts. But a tunnel is also about focus where tunnel vision forces on one an exclusion of peripheral information. It’s about deep concentration, sometimes pathologically so, but can also be positive in its laser focus or, perhaps, negative in missing warning signs of danger.
Tunnels are all about transition, the movement between two distinct states or worlds. That can be profound and be about birth, death and life-altering transformation with the tunnel as liminal space, that great “in-between” that always perplexes us. That’s a common vehicle or reverse deus ex machina in both literature and film for threshold moments. It signifies the unknown in life when you can’t see the full path and yet a commitment to move forward is required before the full outcome is visible. Ain’t no hand of God stepping in to help you as you wallow in the interstitial. It’s a place where risk and faith are forced to coexist. The reaction by the audience or participant to it all depends heavily on the context. Where it’s more manageable in literature where we observe the transformation and are not wedged in it ourselves, it’s more challenging when we are in it up to our necks ourselves. In medicine its about the trajectory of an illness and demarcates the recovery trajectory. In psychology its usually a trauma response or the telltale of a cognitive bias which makes for that tunnel vision. And in the broader world, when we get into politics or economics, whether it’s waiting out a prolonged crisis with promised resolution that never gets where promised (think Iran War), or a market condition like rising inflation and an affordability crisis that gets worse while narratives try to distract us from the reality, we are always looking for that light at the end of the tunnel that never seems to get bigger than a pin dot.
When I think about a tunnel, it becomes a reflection of my state of mind. I want to say that only 10% of the time do I think like a spelunker that a tunnel is a scary confined space that I need to squeeze through while going deeper and deeper into the unknown…obviously a very unnerving thought that some might consider adventuresome, but I find frightening. The far more common state for me that comes into play 90% of the time is to think of the tunnel in Zion National Park. When you enter from the east you get all the elements of tunnel syndrome…it’s dark and foreboding with a sense of confinement and restriction, since it was built many years ago when cars were smaller and tunneling through rock was harder. But then something happens as you venture through the darkness… you see light filtering in from the north side from these small open rock windows that someone decided to put into the wall to give transitory glimpses of what lies ahead. Right away that makes the tunnel different and feel less ominous. It also foreshadows what lies ahead and almost gets you excited about what is to come. Then, suddenly you see the real light at the end of the tunnel from around a shallow curve at the west entrance. You know its there and that the sun is shining on your exit from the darkness. As you come around the final curve you can see the carved stone entrance and then you burst forth into the crisp canyon air of Southern Utah with the blue blue sky above and the red majestic rock of Zion Canyon with its half-dome and spires reaching up to the heavens as you cling to the small cliff-hanging road down to the canyon floor. Now THAT is the sort of tunnel I want to find myself navigating in life. The sort of tunnel exit that makes your heart sing with anticipation, especially when you know it awaits.
My head is simultaneously in several tunnels right now. The one that got me thinking about tunnels today is the physical body tunnel that I have inhabited for my entire life. I entered this mountain tunnel so long ago that I barely remember when that was. I recall at age eight being told by a pediatrician that I had the body of a twelve year old. I remember my mother pinching my love handles on my sides as they overlapped my belt, telling me I should walk around the block for exercise. In junior high school in Maine, my teacher told the entire eight grade class that I was the heaviest kid in the class, weighting in at 214 pounds at age thirteen (I was 5’9”, so classified as Obese Class I)). Teenage boys have lots of things on their minds anyway, but add to my meandering tunnel brain heading off to prep school (living in a dorm with a noisy bunch of early teens) and then moving overseas to Rome where everything was truly different. The point is that while in that dark tunnel, chasing Roman antiquities, motorcycles, a few girls and college dreams, I lost track of my physical body while knowing full well that it was something I needed to lug around on my journey. I found my way out of all the other tunnels, but ignored the physical body tunnel and left myself in there because I could. Over my adult life, I made quite a few attempts to dig my way out of the tunnel, but always fell short and certainly never even faintly saw any light at the end of it. The good news is that it never slowed me down too much.
Twenty years ago, when I started to feel the weight of it all, I heard about and decided to try Lapband surgery. It took me from the deepest and darkest part of the mountain out to a less restrictive and more comfortable tunnel, but a lightless tunnel nonetheless. Then a year ago, for a barely explicable reason (an edema sore on my ankle), I put on my miners lid and started to pickaxe my way westward, first with sheer decision power and then with a dose of Zepbound. The combination worked and I became a human boring machine looking for the exit. Everyone wants to hear about weight loss goals when one is headed for the wall, but I had none. I just wanted out of the tunnel once and for all. Everything I have done, from my weekly Zepbound shot to my eating habits, to my exercise regime, I have done with a sense of permanence. This is my program for the rest of my life and that is all AOK by me. I don’t eat bread or pasta any more. I am fast in outrunning fast food. Ice cream does nothing for me. Breakfast is a faint memory. And as for clothing, I am almost done throwing everything I used to wear out. I have swapped out smaller size pants 4 times now.
They say that at my height, you lose a two-inch pant size for every 15-20 pounds. I’ve lost 90 this time around and gone down 8 inches (11.25 lbs/inch). I just bought a pair of size 40 waist pants, which I have never, ever worn in my life…and they fit. I am 35 pounds out from what I’m told my goal weight should be. That means my target waist size must be 36 inches. That’s my Thanksgiving goal, my finish line. And here’s the thing…I can now see the light at the end of what has been a very long, a life-long tunnel. I just know the canyon ahead will be spectacular.