The fly above, trapped in amber, was caught on the trunk of a tree in an outflow of sap. The image carries with it a sense of disaster; an insect alights safely, finds in a few seconds that several of its legs are immobilized, then fights briefly to pull away until the sap completely encloses its delicate body. The fly is somehow preserved, only to be found millions of years later, encased in a beautifully colored but deadly casket of amber.
A living being becomes a statue, fixed and immobile.
This condition resembles nothing as closely as it does the psychological state traditionally known as catatonia. Most of us, upon hearing this term, will think first of a patient in a mental hospital, frozen and immobile in a rigid posture, someone whose response to the world, to other people, and to events has shut down to almost nothing. They appear dead to the world.
Yet there is a less literal sense in which the fly trapped in amber can tell us about the human condition. Imagine a person who lives an outwardly normal life, yet internally has reached an impasse, a point in life where there is no longer any forward momentum. In every sense but the external, they are at a standstill.
It’s tempting to ask, “Can’t a person in this state have a good life? Perhaps they’ve achieved a life of success and have merely stopped moving forward. Maybe they’re just resting in place.”
Yet the metaphor of the fly immobilized, when we apply it to the human realm, suggests a broken and even failing life, the life of a person unable to live fully, prevented from the flourishing that is their due. Perhaps they have surrendered to the forces that are dragging them to a standstill. They may have come into the grip of depression, a depression that has destroyed all motivation.
A person in this state often feels hopeless, trapped, and helpless. As they go about the everyday affairs of life they may appear fairly normal, except to those who know something of their inner life. On the other hand, we may find them among the homeless and all the others who wander through the world but struggle to fit in, to conform to the lifestyle and customs of society.
Perhaps this state of being without flourishing has become for the sufferer a survivable state of existence. Yet it is a life that, from the inside, often holds no hope of escape.
Observers often grow frustrated and impatient with people in this plight. We may wonder why they don’t get moving. Why don’t they get a job? Why don’t they break out of the funk that not only holds them down, but can drag down the people close to them?
Perhaps they long to do just that, but don’t know how to get from where they are to where they want to be. Even worse, they may have lost any hope that such change is possible.
Those of us looking from the outside must balance our impatience with the virtues of compassion and patience. And of course thankfulness, that such a fate has not befallen us.
Suggested Reading
Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
This book (and the movie by the same name) tell the story of neurologist Sacks’ pioneering work with patients trapped in the outward state of catatonia, the state of physical immobility. This is not the inner state of entrapment discussed above, but still, it brings the metaphor life.
