Flashback: The Tunnel, The Train, & The Hand

(Dyss Says: This is another older post — this one from 2009 — found on a different site and returned here.)

Hi friend

We saw each other tonight, I believe, and I’ve come home to find this outpouring.

I’m Dyss. Its been a long road to get here, and earlier I was talking to someone during the meeting about how its really a lot like the whole tunnel deal.

It is a tunnel. When you start out, the light is still at your back, and its comforting, and you can still see it and know that you can always turn around and run back.

You are, right now, still there. Still at the opening really.

As you go on, it will get dark, and just before it gets dark, you will notice the railroad tracks leading into the darkness, and feel the ties beneath your feet, tripping you a little sometimes. You’ll fall, scratch your palms or elbows or knees, too. IT will get so dark you can’t see anything, nothing behind you and nothing ahead of you.

You can see that part of it from where you are now, the light still at your back.

Its pretty damn scary.

And as you go along, you will enter that really scary part, and it will be too late to turn around without getting lost. You’ll have gone too far to make it back.

And then, into that darkness, you’ll see a light come into being.

and the first thing that will cross your mind is “here’s the train”.

Then you’ll wait for it, and it’ll still be there. And you’ll think, “oh, wait, no…

That’s the light at the end of the tunnel.”

And you’ll start to welcome it, this light in the darkness.

And then you’ll realize that it is indeed the train.

At that moment you’ll have a choice — to step aside and let it pass, to turn and run back, trying hard to get back to that comfy arrangement, or to stand there and let the train hit you.

I’ll be horribly blunt. That train hurts like a son of a bitch when it hits you. IT will seem to cripple your soul, break your heart, shatter you sense of being.

It will take from you everything you love and cherish and need and want.

And it will leave you feeling mangled and bruised there in the dark, the rough stones around the ties in your wounds, the cold steel of the tracks against ya.

Then you can get up, dust yourself off, and walk a bit further, and then you will see the real light at the end of the tunnel.

And as you get closer to it, you will get back everything you lost — and then more and it will all be better — but all of it will be different as well. Not the same, but there nonetheless.

That’s transition.

And when you finally walk out of the tunnel — maybe after some surgery, maybe not. This isn’t physical; this is spiritual, emotional — this is heart and mind and soul and spirit, not flesh and bone and blood.

When you walk out of it, you will find that the land isn’t milk and honey, but it sure as hell beats the grit and grime of the other side. And you will have, as I noted, more than you started with, if you can stop long enough to look around you and see it.

Transition isn’t about what *is*, or what *was*. It is all about what *will be*. The future is what matters — the end of that tunnel. Not the past, not the present. Not now, not then.

But you know what’s really great about transition?

You aren’t alone in that tunnel.

All of us are in it with you.

So pardon me while I wipe the dirt off my hand and reach it out to ya.

But ya look like you could use it 😀