The Light IN the Tunnel.

A post about not deceiving yourself with past or future.

I’m staying with my mum at the moment and have been browsing through a load of old postcards and letters I’d written to her and my grandma back in the mid 90’s.

They are the years I look back upon most fondly. I was working overseas, was largely single. I was young and tanned, went out partying most nights. I have many photographs that ram home the memories of all the adventures I had.

But seeing some of the letters I’d written back then was a sobering affair. 

I am waiting for pay day.

I am moaning nothing is open on Sundays.

I am talking about the weather ‘turning’.

I am saving up to take a course I want to do.

I am asking my mum to send me ‘The Guardian jobs supplement’ and  ‘Boots 17 eye shadow in spilt milk because you can’t get it here’.

Oh, the poetry of that sentence did amuse me!

In short, it wasn’t as rosy as my mind likes to paint it and more than that, often there was an awful lot of tedium. Way more than I’d care to admit.

I’ve always liked the ‘Kinks’ song ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’. To me it captures that idea of photos not telling the full tale. Of them existing as ‘proof’ of times past. ‘Proof’ we then embellish like icing a mediocre cake.

We create narratives for photographs; stories that fit the poses, the sunshine, the youth we wear in white teeth and wide eyes. We mentally airbrush out anything inconvenient or unpleasant.

And that’s why writing (truthful) journals or letters is so useful. We may be able to convince ourselves through photographs of ‘golden eras’ but often, our honest writing reveals another side. It reminds us of the mundane, the waiting, the bad times. The plain old average.

A few days prior to this, I had been on a little ramble. The trees had lent in, offering a tunnel-like quality to the lane.  Within this, I observed shafts of light on the ground. As I focused in, to the sides, I started to see bluebells thriving in the shade, a rabbit scampering away…….

And suddenly, I had a mini epiphany.

“The light is IN the tunnel!”

We are so conditioned to think it is at the end of it, some promised nirvana. But what if the secret is about valuing the beauty in the darkness?

And what if noticing that beauty then starts to bring about more spheres of precious light revealing themselves and building on our capacity to see them, like those ‘magic slates’ children scratch off black to unlock rainbows?

There will always be times we look back on fondly, wish we could relive, maybe go back and change - but regret is futile and not only that, human memory is selective.

We have only now.

The lane we walk today.

We can walk it with our head turned back, looking at the light we came from.

One foot in the past.

We can walk it fixated on the light ‘at the end of the tunnel’.

One foot in the future.

But old light, is deception made from moonshine and to embrace a dawn not yet born, is to succumb to imagination.

The only ‘light’ we truly have is the dappled light we walk in right now.

The light that comes WITH shade.

The light IN the tunnel.