Inertia. The first law of motion, stating that an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion
with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an external force.
If a ball stays at
rest, it will not move. If a ball is rolling down a hill, it will keep rolling,
at the same speed, in the same direction, until some external force, like
friction or an obstacle blocking its way, makes it stop.
Human lives are also
subject to inertia. When people choose to do nothing, the world doesn’t change.
And when we do start something, it keeps rolling on and on, building momentum
like a snowball. Here’s a story of inertia, how things can never change, and
how things can keep changing.
A girl gets on a coach,
heading to the airport. She’s tired and distracted, stuffing her bag in the
overhead rack before sitting down with a sigh. A guy boards the coach too, and
sits just behind her. He’s on the phone to his dad, telling him he’ll be home
in a few hours. The girl overhears the conversation and smiles, as she’s
heading to the airport to pick her mum up. She looks for her mobile phone to
check the arrival time again, but her phone is nowhere to be seen.
She panics,
and starts rummaging around her handbag and coat pockets again and again, but
to no avail. She checks her backpack in the overhead rack, still no phone. As
her tears threaten to fall, she checks under her seat to see if her phone was
there, and turns around to the guy behind her, asking: “Could you please check
under your seat if my phone is there, I can’t seem to find it.” The guy, just
finishing his phone conversation, immediately checks and looks around, but no
phone was in sight. As he tells this to the girl, he notices her red watery
eyes and her distress.
Inertia. If he had left it at there, this story ends just like that. The girl
doesn’t find her phone, she cries silently, and nothing changes. The ball stays
at rest.
However, an external
force starts the ball rolling. He asks her: “Do you want me to call your phone
and see if you can hear it ring?” She was so relieved at the offer, and gives
her phone number to him. He dials, and at first they hear nothing. He tries
again, and she hears a faint sound from the gap between the seats, and finds
her phone. She cries in happiness, and thanks him profusely. They smile at each
other, and he’s happy to have done a good deed.
Inertia. The ball keeps rolling.
She found her phone,
and manages to call her mother at the airport, who had arrived early and didn’t
know that her daughter was coming to pick her up as it was a surprise. If she
hadn’t found her phone, that girl and her mum would likely have missed each
other at the airport, and another sad event would have occurred. That one good
deed has spread the happiness and spared two people from unhappiness.
Inertia. The ball keeps rolling.
The girl tells the
story of the guy on the coach to her mum, and her mum insists on sending a
message to the guy to thank him. She sends a thank you message, and he replies.
That conversation somehow lengthened, and they became friends. He told her that
he’d gone home and taken some time off because he couldn’t cope with life in
university, and it turns out they went to the same university but different
courses. She becomes a really good friend, and thanks to her support, he goes
back to university, and they graduate in the same year.
That guy is now my
husband. On the day of our wedding, he gave me a framed print of my thank you
message, the one I sent him all those years ago. “This was the message that
started it all, this is where our story started. This time, it’s my turn to
thank you, for choosing me, and we’ll continue our story together from now on”.
Inertia. Our story is still going on, like the ball that keeps rolling, until
the external force called death comes and parts us. In every moment of life, we
hold the power to change the lives of people around us, we all own a force that
can decide whether the world changes or stays the same. Love, kindness, and
empathy can move people in the right directions; every good deed keeps going on
and on, spreading like ripples. Don’t let the forces of anger, selfishness and
envy stop the ripples. As long as we keep those ripples going strong, we can make
the world a happier place, if only just by a little bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment