Here’s what it’s all about.
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
There’s a particular weight to mornings when you should move but find yourself calcified beneath the duvet. Not from the heaviness of sleep but the pull of yesterday’s choices, last week’s momentum, and the mass of all the times you choose the familiar over the unknown.
You lie there, watching dust motes drift through the aureate light, each particle following what feels like its predetermined trajectory until some imperceptible current shifts its course. How something so infinitesimal can float suspended until the slightest perturbation sends it spiralling in an entirely new direction.
In this universe, we’re not so different. It’s the physics of being human. This is inertia.
Inertia looks at the cartography of stasis. I want to help people learn more about conscious and simple living based on what I have already learned and am learning. For years, I inhabited a particular rhythm. Wake up at the same time, travel the same routes, respond to the same stimuli with the dialogue I could hardly call my own. There was a seductive quality to this—the way routine creates a kind of cognitive scaffolding to reduce the number of decisions required just to navigate another day.
Somewhere in that comfortable predictability, I began to ossify. My thoughts followed well-worn neural pathways like water finding the same channels in the porous stone. My body moved through space with the automaticity of a pendulum. My responses to people, to challenges, to opportunity were too well rehearsed to wake me out of my daze.
Inertia, I learned, is movement without intention, momentum without awareness. The body in motion while the spirit remains stationary.
It started in Sorrento, where a teenager first tasted reality’s salt. I remember catching my reflection during a reflection. The recognition that I had become a curator of my own limitations, carefully preserving the boundaries of my comfort zone with the meticulousness of a night museum guard.
Every day I chose not to choose was itself a choice. You can’t decorate your life on hope. Every day I followed the established patterns to vote for continuity over possibility, mistaking consistency for virtue and routine for wisdom. Perhaps what I really needed was the courage to introduce some beneficial turbulence into my existence.
How do you feel when tomorrow keeps wearing today’s face? When promotions turn into vapour, when beautiful stories end mid-breath, and when bank accounts mock your midnight ambitions? My essays are weekly reflections about why there’s more than arriving at your greatest dreams; they’re about travelling, learning, and finding joy all the way through.
This is the art of inertia: learning to be both the body in motion and the force that acts upon it, the one who follows the established path and the one who chooses when it's time to carve a new one through the landscape of possibility. Click below if you’d like to explore this.
