The path of least resistance is downhill
Inertia — Nº193
Watch water long enough and you'll learn everything you need to know about human nature. Leonardo da Vinci knew this—he spent forty-five years knowing this—from his first dated drawing of a river cascading over rocks to his final visions of great deluges. He saw in water not chaos, but physical laws. Beautiful spectacles of rippling certainty. The way it finds the cracks, the subtle depressions, the almost invisible decline that inevitably leads down. No contemplation. No resistance. Just the soft acceptance of the easiest path, carving canyons through nothing more than faithful surrender to the pull.
We’re not so different, really. Human nature carves canyons for the future to follow, and our lives follow the same principle—energy seeking its lowest state, effort giving way to ease, and intentions dissolving into whatever path lies most readily before us. Like a tired lover sinking into familiar arms. Inertia’s quiet power. It doesn’t announce itself with trumpets or emphatic collapses, but in the gentle downstream drift of postponed decisions, in the soft erosion of intentions, in the comfortable wearing away of once-sharp edges into smooth, unremarkable curves.
I felt it last week, the dance between ambition and ease. Scrolling through my phone while a book I’d meant to read gathered dust across the room. The book is great, and I know it. But it inherently demands attention, engagement, notetaking, and the mental strain of new ideas growing new neural pathways. The phone offers well-worn grooves of distraction. A comfortable decline into mindless consumption. I hadn’t chosen to abandon reading; I simply failed to choose reading over its easier alternative. The water had found its natural course.
That’s the decline. Not in conscious surrender but in unconscious acceptances while minutes pool into hours, while the hours dissolve into days. Just water finding its natural course, as water always does. We get closer to the new year and the return of the cycle we all know: gym memberships turn into monthly donations. Creative projects dissolve into “someday” dreams. Relationship rekindling thins into routine messages. This is how dreams die in the modern age. Not in grand renunciations but in the quiet conclusion of choosing not to choose.
So it sounds like we’re just like water. But the clear divergence is in how we can move uphill. Every cathedral spire, every pyramid point, every ancient achievement in our history that reaches skyward stands as a testament to our capacity to resist the downstream pull, from choosing the harder path not despite its difficulty but because of it. We’ve lost that somewhat. But growth, by definition, is living in the deliberate climb, in choosing the harder path not despite its difficulty but because of it.
The trick, I’m learning, isn’t in making better choices—it’s in continuously recognising that not choosing is itself a choice and usually a choice to decline. Every moment we don’t actively resist the pull downstream is a silent vote for its direction.
There is no neutral ground on a slope.
So perhaps the question I leave you with isn’t to ask, “What should I do?”—though God knows I’ve worn that one smooth with repetition—but, “What am I choosing by doing nothing?” Because Inertia isn’t only a force—it’s a future, quietly shaping itself in every moment we let the water find its way down. In every moment we trade growth for comfort. And in every time we mistake floating for swimming.