A panoply of social types go into making our world; ranging from social butterflies to shy lemurs. We each encounter, and perhaps embody, a variety of selves in a variety of situations. But what impels us to act in certain ways in certain circumstances? And, speaking especially of the motivational mishaps endemic to a chosen lifestyle that includes distance education, how do we impel our get up and go in the face of numerous counter-veiling influences, many of them social?
Working alone in a room with just oneself and one’s chosen inanimate influence—coffee, for instance, can lead to a rabbit hole of inertia. Inertia that, as Isaac Newton taught, leads us to, like an apple on a flat table, go nowhere fast. It’s that time-honored first law of Newtonian physics: “an object at rest tends to stay at rest.” Yet, wherever the flux and flow of creative juices exist there’s a metaphoric link to the hard-and-fast realm of physics where possibilities are merely one external shove away. Sometimes we have to be our own external influence, by reminding ourselves that our future self is dependent on our stagnant, flaccid, current embodiment of lithe academic activity.
Perhaps we’ve all had a day with no work or play, just straight life recovery where, as morning shifts to afternoon our mind shifts to the reality that we have not, as it were, done anything at all but been at rest while our coursework or hobbies go untended and undone. Here the nature of the cosmos intertwines like a vine with the possibilities that we prevent when we don’t have an exit plan from our supine state.
Now, to be fair, the undoing of best-laid plans and study schedules falls more under the concept of entropy—whereby the universe is said to slowly but inexorably shift toward a realm of chaos and disorder. It’s as though, left to its natural devices, the universe literally works against our constructive efforts towards efficacy. But entropy’s very not-doing—or undoing—besides being intriguing in a Zen way, also more clearly illustrates the law of inertia which states that “every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force. This tendency to resist changes in a state of motion is inertia. If all the external forces cancel each other out, then there is no net force acting on the object.” To be productive, in other words, some first move has to be triggered. For something to happen, things have to happen, speaking tautologically. Fortunately, to this end, we humans have minds of our own. It behooves us, then, to realize that our better angels of productivity must be actively called into service
Resisting change or motion in a creative human way is as natural as apple pie for students the world over. Learning, unlike gaming, takes effort that does not come naturally: we have no law of physics to metaphorically rescue us from our own languor. In fact, the way of nature seems stacked against us delving with efficacy into our studies. Only the most diligent, or perplexingly inspired among us, can honestly say they are drawn out of their realm of inertia and moved, thematically as well as physically, toward that textbook.
So perhaps to impel some action, to get us out of inertia study doldrums, we might have to contravene the old belief that one best not compare ourselves to others. We might, to realize that we want to go somewhere, academically and in life, spend a moment looking at where we’ve been or where others are and have been. Here pop culture celebrities, when they deign to open up about their oft-sordid pasts, can provide some countenance to our tendency to just do nothing, or anything rather than our schoolwork. We can learn from other specimens to see our fate lest we fail at our schooling efforts. The world is, as we know from demographic surveys related to political reporting about voter intentions, absolutely awash with folks who didn’t finish high school or fall into that famed “some college” category – not finishing a four-year degree, in other words.
And darker than that are those among us, perhaps even our past selves, who engaged in crimes of larceny or sins of the heart before our better impulses sent us on our way to a more edifying future version of ourselves. The beloved country/pop singer, Jelly Roll, in his own words explains how his inner inertia has given way, relatively late in life, to an avowed desire to do good and be good, to actively motion himself to a place in life and in relations that won’t bring shame to his conscience and peers; this after jail time and probation after being convicted of theft to supply his teen cannabis habit.
“I had no business taking from anybody,” Jelly explained. “Just the entitlement that I had, that the world owed me enough that I could come take your stuff. It’s just what a horrible, horrible way to look at life and people. What a horrible way to interact with the Earth.”
“I took zero accountability for anything in my life. I was the kid that if you asked what happened, I immediately started with everything but me. And it took years for me to break that, like years of work, solid work to just like break that. It also has taken years of work for me to even forgive that kid.”
Suddenly it may dawn on us in our lives that the desire to fulfill ourselves academically, though overcome by inertia and the tendency to stay in bed or stay in our rut of non-productive activities, relates wholly to our future selves. We likely want to look back and be proud of who we were and how far we came on our life journey, ideally, with a pinch of humor to go with that wisdom. Even while hiding in our beds from life’s angst and sharing memes along the lines of “the fact that I cannot explode into a thousand bats to escape awkward social situations is a constant source of irritation” the very fact that our future self is there with us as a sort of hall monitor, can be that teensy shove that leads us in a productive direction. After all, the will to escape a situation is itself an inborn drive the likes of which can rarely be overcome once thrust into action. Like feeling the rhythm and finding oneself dancing. we don’t always realize how heartfelt our actions are until years later. All we can be sure of is that we do have to face life and overcome dilemmas. Sooner or later, liking it or not, inertia will be overcome by that thing called life. And in that realm. at least, physics really does apply to the social realm.
