Though I left engineering school after a year, I’m still a hopeless nerd for physics. One of my favorite principles is inertia – a body in motion stays in motion and a body at rest stays at rest until acted upon by an outside force. It’s true for physical matter, and true for the trajectory of our lives as well. We do what we’re doing until there’s a change.
For our lives, that change can be internal or external. We can choose it. We can slow down when we’re going too fast, and we can get ourselves in gear if we feel stuck. It takes a great deal of effort to cause that shift, but it’s possible.
Eventually something in life is going to throw us a roadblock and we’ll have to pivot and change. That is the game. That is the dance. Change within or accept the change forced from the outside. I’d always rather be the master of my own pivot so I keep changing, growing, evolving, transforming. It’s all I know how to do so I keep going. Which is its own kind of inertia. Ah inertia – the force of life that keeps on giving and follows us everywhere.
Christa Avampato 