Maiuko's article from Transitions One

     Fire in the Tunnel

     Maiuko

I was born in Mozambique in 1962. From my native land to England via sojourns in Swaziland and Portugal, I have so far lived a life full of experiences and all sorts of transitions, many of these naturally expected, progress following a smooth process of development. Others were not so obvious and of course the “unexpected” brought about anxiety and on occasions panic before I could move on to reflection or denial as part of the self-coping-mechanism.

I would like to share with you a moment of clarity I experienced during one transition under the waters of the Channel:

I was on my way to France with my partner for a romantic weekend in Paris, when instead I found myself trapped within a horror of darkness, smoke billowing all around me. Ours had been the first car inside the Channel Tunnel and we were told to return to it and wind up the windows.  After grasping the situation I deduced these were probably my last hours and  with no expectation of getting out alive began what felt like a regressive never-ending journey through my own life’s story.

That was the first time I found myself reflecting on my life as if that person from the past was someone else, looked at by me. I struggled initially to find order in this process but soon it became very clear. In the beginning I saw myself as a happy child nurtured by love in a family environment, but soon felt sorry for that same child who became a soldier in a civil war of grown-ups‘ politics. I felt empathy every time she moved to a new school or country and had to make sense of self-worth in environments of all sorts of discrimination and non inclusion. I respected the teenager that survived the first stages of self-development every time they were interrupted by unexpected changes, then avoided thinking about all the mistakes that the young lady made every time she “knew best“. I remembered with a smile and a tear when she fell in love for the first time, and felt overwhelmed by concern remembering when later she left her family home, “in search of self“.         

Before I had the chance to go through my experiences after I‘d left home, I came to and realised that I’d been trapped for three hours. The officers informed everyone that the incident had been caused by a passenger who’d found it hard to wait seventeen minutes for a cigarette and attempting to smoke it inside his car had accidentally dropped it under the seat where it caught fire. The rescue team moved all the cars out of the tunnel until the smoke was completely cleared. After a long while, I found myself reversed to where I started; outside the tunnel inside which I had rewound time.

Later, when the rescue team started re-loading, most of the traumatised passengers had given up the idea of travelling under the water. I asked myself should I still get in the Tunnel and go to Paris for my romantic weekend? Would I do it all again?  A moment of clarity confirmed it. Of course I would. It would be worse to be stuck in a tunnel empty of experiences because I’d deprived myself of a second chance or feared moving on into the unknown. Life is for living and I shall continue to embrace all transitions as they arise.