The Light at the End of a Tunnel Is Another Tunnel
There's more to life than just one quest
“Stand up, spin around three times anti-clock-wise, then sit down and write down the answers to these three questions without thinking too much:
Who am I?
Why am I here?
What am I searching for in life?”
It was 1998, the IATEFL East conference held in Romania. I was a junior teacher, only just starting to realise what this profession was all about. The workshop I was attending was about – I don’t remember. I only remember the three questions. And only one of the answers I scribbled down: I’m searching for beauty.
Where did I get that from? No idea, out of the ether, I suppose. Maybe out of the disconnect with the logical, intellectual half of my brain induced by spinning anti-clock-wise (as the workshop host explained), and the sudden surfacing of my background self, like a diver splashing out of the water, gasping for air.
Beauty? What rushed through my mind in those moments were breathtaking sunsets contemplated from a beach, thoughts and feelings only half whispered but fully understood, encounters and goodbyes that enriched me (and the other). Stories throbbing with significance like a good novel. A heroine walking among metaphors.
“There’s one Me at work and another one at home – and that’s what’s getting me down. This disconnect, the daily switch back and forth. I wish there was continuity. I wish the Me at work was all of Me,” I confessed to my best friend.
It was the early 2000s.
The Me at work connected to people easily, laughed, had just the right replies, was fully focused and in the flow of my passion for what I was doing. Peers, managers, and course participants – they looked me in the eye, acknowledged me, and were often startled into laughter or reflection by my words. Interactions were alive. I was alive.
At home? The household routine, bickering with the family, budgeting domestic investments, not caring to project my self through what I said or how I dressed. Not caring about my self. Vegetating.
In the summer of 2000, I spent three weeks on a prestigious language school campus near Cambridge, UK. I had my work-Me for myself the whole day. Although I wasn’t doing much work, actually. There was all that beauty I’d thought of at the conference two years back: the English countryside and quaint villages, stunning Cambridge, a profession I loved, people to hold as my own.
Plus something else: a feeling of being alive. Of awakening. One of my mentors would exclaim: “Leave Zoe alone, she’s not doing anything. She’s just being.”
I told myself that that time in Cambridge would stay with me forever as a time I came out of the tunnel.
I knew now that I needed to feel things. I was searching for experience, passion, and intensity. Being alive. Flow.
I create people. First I invent them. For this purpose, I take the shadow that stops by I find its black holes and fill them with the colours in my mind. They bow to tie their shoe strings And I see them bowing to a temple. They drop a tear on the latest soap And I detect underground oceans of feeling Tossing in their breasts. Oh, am I generous creating the hero to my matching!
I wrote this in 2015. I called myself Forever Quixote back then. Whoever I came to know that I’d hope might become significant (mostly romantically), I filled in gaps with the substance of my own imagination. Without being aware for a single second. By then, I’d become such an experienced language teacher – I’d even moved on from teaching – that gap-filling was coming automatically. But instead of claiming the filling as my own, I assigned it to “the way things were”. Reality.
In 2015, I’d already been appalled a few times by reality checks. In the early 2000s, I’d flown half a planet away to explore what I thought would be a great love. I’d done every bit of thinking as deep as could have been expected. I even left a note with my best friend about where insurance contracts were in my house, in case whatever happened to me. Stunningly realistic in the details, stupefyingly utopian in the enterprise itself.
I got back home in a state of shock. The person had been civil but in cynical denial. Did I think he’d meant things romantically (grin, eyebrows raised in surprise)? On hugging me goodbye at his airport, he whispered, though: “Stay as beautiful – and nice – and brave!”
In 2015, I wanted no more gap-filling. No more inventing people. Be safe from self-delusion. From disappointment.
It was truth I wanted. It would take a little longer until I came out of that tunnel.
“Stop driving like in Romania, will you, this is Germany, for hell’s sake. No more stunts. You must fit in,” my then-partner, German, told me. I made a mental note that I must fit in. I was in Germany now.
It was 2009.
I tried to fit in with the neighbourhood that gathered only to get tipsy on disgustingly sweet and colourful spirits. But I couldn’t. The next thing was to wonder where I might move so I could better fit in. Wherever work or weekend trips took me, I asked myself: could I live here?
It took a few years to realise that wherever I moved, I’d never really, truly belong. There’s that belonging that comes with a shared past. My past was buried somewhere else. So much for belonging.
And that made me despair. How else could I possibly belong? If not in a German town, maybe in my work? In a small circle of friends? In a (new) relationship? Should I buy a house?
None of that offered itself as an option.
Until I came to live here.
I’ll never share a past with the Black Foresters. Nor with the Badener (between the Black Forest and River Rhine). I can only understand them with difficulty when they speak Alemannisch.
But I feel at home here. And I don’t care that I don’t belong historically. I’ve done over fifty hiking trails and still have as many on my to-do list. I’m starting to get a mental map of the place. I’m proud, when people visit me, to show them around. It’s my place. I’m invested in the endless beauty here, in the vivid cultural flair, and in the relics of its past.
I have stopped caring about belonging. Maybe because I already belong.
And with this, I’ve come out of yet another tunnel.
I smile when I remember the summer of 2000, when I told myself I’m coming out of the tunnel.
As if there was only one.
Tunnel after tunnel, tunnel leading into tunnel, tunnel on top of tunnel.
What are you searching for in life? Better: What are you searching for in life at the moment?
I’ve been searching for beauty, for flow, for truth, and for belonging. One after another, they melted into something else, or into irrelevance.
I’m not searching for anything any longer. Along my quests, I’ve finally found my self, and I simply want to be with it.
Leave Zoe alone, she’s not doing anything, she’s just being!
What are you searching for in life — at the moment?
Have you been through distinct tunnels, like me?
Some quests seem to be about finding something, others about finding that the quest isn’t important after all. Have you experienced either of that?
There are so many great moments in this piece. I loved this:
I find its black holes
and fill them with the colours in my mind.
And so much in between that and the ending:
I have stopped caring about belonging. Maybe because I already belong.
There were so many other touching and insightful moments, but I will end with the one you basically chose to end with.
We tend to think, this is my goal in life, my biggest need, my Eldorado. And then we often realize (or we don't, but the fact is still there) that things change, we change. Maybe we even live more lives in one lifetime.