Physics, Meet Life
Thursday, 29 November 2007.
I havn’t posted any thoughts or musings or programs for a very long time—I believe my last was two months ago. And why is that, might you ask? Laziness is the simple answer. I got lazy, and I stopped writing.
But this is indicative of a deeper truth: momentum. It’s taken me a while, but I've discovered why some people have an amazing capacity for “getting things done” while others do practically nothing at all: the doers have momentum.
See, as with all physical objects, humans have inertia. That is, they resist change. If you are at rest, you tend to stay at rest. If you're in motion, you tend to stay in motion. The trick to being prolific, or continually loving, or active, or breaking any kind of habit is in the momentum—once you build up speed, it’s very hard to stop you.
There’s an old proverb: “The hardest part is getting started.” It’s true. If you're lazy, you're not going to stop being lazy until you not only start being active, but stay active for a significant period of time. If it can be kept up, then it will stay with you until you let it die.
For example, examine love. They say that it is natural for love to begin with passion and slowly fade away into subtlety, into a more subdued form. I disagree wholeheartedly—and perhaps this is naive idealism—because I think that if a couple can keep their initial momentum and maintain their passion, then it can continue unabated forever: it’s a matter of pushing up the hills so you can keep rolling down the other sides of them. (I suppose this is a refinement of my previous thought that love’s outpouring is creativity. Keeping life new and interesting is the same thing as being passionate—so giving creatively is the same thing as loving, in some senses.)
A teacher of mine, whom I've always respected, always said, “Attitude is everything. Every day is a good day, but some are better than others.” It’s trite and cute, so it was easy to forget the meaning; but I'm beginning to realize how right it is. Life is, quite simply, what you make of it.
So, there is always hope, in the sense of self-renewal: one can always reinvent themselves out of a rut, as long as they push hard enough to gain momentum.
