periods of limbo

A period of limbo. This phrase often comes to me when I am waiting consumingly for something.

These moments become only defined by and experienced through the proceeding event. They are defined by their preceding relation to the thing I am waiting for, not as themselves. Thus, they are wasted, they become blurry insignificance, a means to an end.

Small, like the journey to and from work, the waiting by the door for a friend.

Or larger in significance; travelling from one country or city to another, the few days before a trip where you are living out of a packed suitcase, the last day of holiday.

Or even larger: the future, the vague illusion that there is more somewhere distant but nearing.

Despite our inclination to let these periods of limbo pale into unimportance in the face of future – life is concealed in this waiting, in periods of limbo, in ‘nothingness’, in Sunday evenings.

Life is a period of limbo.

Fernando Pessoa wrote, which I find pessimistic and exhilarating in equal measure: ‘We are death… The dead are born, they do not die. These worlds have become reversed for us. When we think we are alive, we are dead; we live even while we lie dying.’

Living in Devon, soaking up summer sun on a Saturday of no particular importance, I wrote in my journal: ‘Life is a holiday’. This was true to me: in my daily life on this random Saturday, I had found a holiday. But I couldn’t think of what from, what defines a holiday other than what it is a limbo period between? As Pessoa defines it, it is from death, from eternal nothingness.

Life is a holiday from eternal nothing.

Life is a limbo period. It is also made of countless periods of limbo within it.

Why rush through this period of limbo? Knowing there is nothing to follow?

This seed of thought started on a plane.

When you are on a plane you are suspended: in time, in air. You are poised in the space between two experiences.

There is nothing to do here but be suspended. The world does not exist to me. Above the clouds, I see a sky saturated by sun for the first time in months. I am realising how much I missed the sun when I see the infinite summer that exists above grey.

I cannot do anything except sit in the time and the space I am travelling through. It becomes defined as itself. It becomes its own moment. This window and this seat.

And this time is my own. To write, read, look out at the carpet of clouds that appear as mountains in some alien land. It is summer up here. They look like something solid that I wouldn’t fall through. The sun is in my eyes, but it is the depths of winter. I am noticing acutely. I am suspended outside of time.

I am waiting in this place that could easily not exist as its own moment, because of its place between two experiences – but isn’t everything?

Sitting here I am unable to reach for anything other than what I have, I cannot pull from a device any instantaneous entertainment that hasn’t already been planned. I both must, and can, sit in this period of limbo, there is nothing to do but let the time pass and to notice it. To let myself experience fully space and time in a manner that, for this hour, is acute and noticeable.

This period of limbo affords permission to sit. To wait, yes, but in waiting, to notice time. To notice the physical journey of self from one space to another. To make it a moment in itself.

To not wait with a sense of boredom, but to sit in time with no expectation of making it into the thing it precedes.

The next thing will come, the previous will fall away.

I want to treat all periods of limbo like this. To live in them and fully occupy them, look out the window, take it all in. Experience rather than wait. Because we are only ever going to find ourselves suspended between two things.