Sitting here in limbo

A right old mess

I guess the song that might become an earworm without even having played it back or heard it in decades is Sitting In Limbo from Jimmy Cliff’s Another Cycle album released in 1971. It catches the zeitgeist like no other situation that might evince today.

In the strangest matter of coincidence with the dead hand of bureaucracy, a contract renewal is anything but, the spirit of the environment is willing, but the letter of the situation is an interminable chain of decisions, committees, assessments, and conclusions. Each a variable of unquantifiable measurement in days or requirements that the result might well not be bet on.

Nobody knows the plot

That is how, as this engagement ends with the prospect of our return, though we cannot say for how long, when for or whether at all the farewells should be said or deferred. Sitting here in limbo of events completely outside our control because needs must in the hands of those who see process rather than people and the extended effects on their lives, livelihoods, and humanity, we have become birds without songs.

Yet, we must not despair, for even in the midst and quagmire of uncertainty, limbo is a place of transition, as the music is on repeat playback in my head, these words, “Well, they're putting up a resistance, But I know that my faith will lead me on.”