Hmmm, can we free ourselves from the dead weight of inertia?
It seems like a lifetime ago that the COVID19 pandemic was officially declared and the world as we knew it shifted off its axis. I recall the Friday morning at work when we were told to take our laptops home for the weekend just in case. By the end of the weekend, just in case had become until further notice.
Initially, we all thought until further notice meant at most a few months. Then it became six months, then a year and then… you know the rest of that story. We were shut down, turned around and locked down.
Flash forward to today and work from home has become a permanent state for many of us. I am quite happy with that arrangement. But I have come to realize that it is part of a bigger, seismic shift that has some not so nice repercussions.
For extended periods of time over the 2+ year period we were told to stay put (at home), stay apart (six feet) and stay away (from work). By and large, we did. What we did not foresee was that Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion would take on a whole new dimension.
Newton’s First Law states: A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force. In layman’s terms, this simply means that things cannot start, stop or change direction by themselves. It requires a force acting on them from outside to cause such a change.
We stopped moving, lost our day to day momentum and quite literally got stuck. I will confess that it happened to me. I adapted to being at home most of the time. It became an adjustment, then a habit and now an engrained state of being.
I am naming the phenomenon Pandemic Inertia. We stopped moving, because we were ordered to do so, and while we were not paying attention inertia set in. Inertia is a tough state to break. It feels like we are dragging a hundred pound anchor around which discourages us from moving.
A consequence of this inertia is that we have been drawn deeper into the virtual world. We connect via our laptop screen or digital device. The ability to connect virtually certainly has its advantages. But as a steady diet it really is not enough. There is no substitute for face to face.
The impetus is now on us, each of us personally, to get ourselves moving again. Those who make their living from creating ever more immersive forms of virtual reality would rather that we did not do so. They have a vested interest in keeping us stuck. But we have a vested interest in getting moving again. Our physical and mental health depends upon it.
So my ask of each of you is to fight back against pandemic inertia and reclaim the life you knew before the lockdowns. Cut loose the anchor that got tied to you.
In Newtonian terms, we have to be the force that starts each other moving again. We were meant to be in motion and it is time we started acting that way again.
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Tags: anchor · inertia · Isaac Newton · metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · Newton's First Law of Motion · pandemicNo Comments