Limbo
Field Notes · Justin McDermott
Being stuck in traffic can reveal how much we carry into a difficult moment. A reflection on when to act, when to wait, when the road itself needs changing, and how we find love while the way ahead is unclear.
There are times in life when we find ourselves in limbo, and being stuck in traffic seems an almost perfect representation of it. You know where you want to go, perhaps you even know the road well, yet suddenly everything slows and then stops. From where you are sitting you cannot see what has happened ahead. There may have been an accident, there may be roadworks, or perhaps there are simply too many cars trying to move through too little space. The obstruction might be just around the next bend and disappear within minutes, or it might be kilometres away, affecting thousands of people and requiring far more patience than you had expected when you began the journey.
From inside the car, though, all of these possibilities initially feel much the same. You are not moving, you cannot see why, and you have very little control over what happens next.
How you experience that moment depends on much more than the traffic itself. Perhaps you have plenty of time, good music playing and nowhere particularly urgent to be. You might sit back, listen to the melodies and begin watching the strange ballet of cars around you as people merge, brake, inch forward, change lanes and occasionally make space for one another. On another day the same delay could feel unbearable. You might be late for something important, worried about someone waiting at the other end, exhausted from lack of sleep, grieving, frightened, short of money or already carrying the accumulated stress of everything that happened before you even turned the key.
The traffic has not necessarily changed, but the life that entered it has.
This is where the metaphor begins to resemble many of the difficulties we encounter in life. From a distance, a problem can look relatively simple. Something has interrupted movement and the person has become stuck. Yet the closer we get to that person, the more complicated the picture becomes. Their history has entered the traffic with them, along with their relationships, fears, losses, confidence, supports, responsibilities and their sense of whether the world around them is basically safe or something they must constantly defend themselves against.
There is also the question of what is actually causing the blockage, because not every traffic jam requires the same response. If there has been an emergency just ahead, immediate action may be necessary. If there are simply too many cars, there may be little that one driver can do other than move carefully and wait for the congestion to ease. If the blockage is local, another route might be available. If it stretches for kilometres, changing lanes repeatedly in search of a faster path may achieve nothing except creating more frustration.
Human problems can be equally difficult to read from inside them.
Sometimes what is stopping us is close and relatively navigable. There may be something we can change ourselves: a decision we have avoided, a boundary we need to set, a direction that no longer suits us or a way of understanding something that needs to shift. At other times the difficulty reaches far beyond the individual. Trauma may belong partly to our own history, but it can also run through families, communities and societies. Poverty, exclusion, violence, discrimination, broken systems and collective loss cannot simply be thought away by the individual who happens to be caught inside them.
What feels internal and what is external are not always easily separated either. The road outside us affects the traffic within us, while what we carry internally changes the way we experience the road. Personal trauma may make a present obstruction feel more dangerous because previous roads have taught us what can happen when things go wrong. A community can carry its own wounds and pass some of their weight through generations. Sometimes a person is trying to navigate both at once: their own pain and the conditions surrounding it.
This makes the most important question more complicated than simply asking, “How do I get moving again?”
We first have to ask what kind of traffic we are in.
Is there an emergency requiring immediate help, or is the urgency mostly coming from the distress of being unable to move? Is this something I can navigate myself, or does someone else need to become involved? Is there another road, or would changing direction simply take me further from where I want to go? Is the problem within my control, partly within it, or largely produced by circumstances that no individual could reasonably solve alone? Do I need action, assistance, resistance, a new direction, a different perspective, or simply enough patience to allow something larger than me to move in its own time?
Being stuck can make all of these questions harder because immobility creates urgency. When nothing is moving, we naturally want to do something. We change lanes. We check the map again. We watch the clock. We begin imagining what must be happening ahead, often without enough information to know whether we are right.
The same thing can happen during periods of psychological distress, grief, illness, isolation or psychosis. The desire for movement can become so strong that any movement begins to look preferable to waiting. Yet sometimes patience is not passivity. It is recognising that the obstruction cannot be forced away simply because we desperately want it gone.
At other times, patience can become its own trap. There is little value in waiting indefinitely beside something that could be changed, just as there is little value in blaming ourselves because we cannot personally clear an entire motorway. Part of finding our way may involve learning the difference between what is navigable and what requires time, between what belongs within our agency and what requires help from other people, communities or systems.
This distinction matters in how we respond to other people as well.
From further back on the road, somebody may believe they can see exactly what the person ahead should do. They might tell them to change lanes, take an exit or simply calm down and wait. Sometimes this advice will help, but sometimes the exit they are pointing toward is not available from where the other person is sitting. Sometimes what appears to be a failure of coping is actually a failure of the road itself. We can spend enormous energy teaching people to tolerate broken roads when perhaps some of those roads need repairing.
This is particularly important when someone is experiencing a world that others cannot easily see. During psychosis, for example, telling somebody what the road looks like from your position does not necessarily change what it looks like from theirs. You may have information they cannot see, but they also have an experience you cannot simply remove by describing a different one.
Perhaps this is where companionship becomes as important as direction.
Sometimes the most useful thing another person can do is not grab the wheel or insist they know exactly what lies ahead, but sit beside us for long enough to look at the situation together. Is there danger here? Is there another way through? Do we need more help? Is something within our control, or are we facing something that will take time? Can the destination still be reached from this road, or has the journey itself changed?
There is something about love in this too.
Finding love when everything is flowing easily is one thing. Finding it while stuck, uncertain, frightened or frustrated is considerably harder. Love may not remove the obstruction. It cannot always clear the road, change the past or make the traffic move faster. Sometimes its role is simply to prevent the person inside the car from becoming completely alone with the blockage.
At other times love asks more of us. It may require us to challenge the road, call for help, create another route or recognise that expecting someone to navigate an impossible situation alone is itself part of the problem.
Eventually something changes. The traffic begins moving, an exit appears, another route becomes possible, or we realise that the destination we were so desperate to reach no longer matters in quite the same way. Sometimes the obstruction disappears almost without us noticing. Sometimes we discover that what felt like wasted time was changing us while we waited.
Perhaps that is one of the strangest things about limbo. Being stuck does not necessarily mean that nothing is happening.
There are moments when we need to act, moments when we need other people, moments when the road itself needs to change and moments when all we can reasonably do is remain where we are until the way forward becomes clearer. Learning the difference may be one of the harder parts of travelling.
And while we wait, there is still life inside the car. There is music. There are people around us carrying journeys we know nothing about. There are opportunities to let somebody merge, to look beyond our own frustration, to change direction when a genuine opening appears and to accept that some distances cannot be crossed simply by pressing harder on the accelerator.
Limbo is not outside the journey.
Sometimes it is where we learn how to travel.