Beware of the inertia

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
November 6, 2012

It’s a term in physics. Inertia refers to “the tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest or of a body in straight line motion to stay in motion in a straight line unless acted on by an outside force.”

While etymologically it derives from the Latin word “iners,” meaning idleness, it can also refer to motion that refuses to stop or change course against good reason.

It’s a term that can be applied also to an anomalous spiritual situation when we get stuck either into laziness or mindless, automatic activism or workaholism that goes nowhere, and we seem to resist any change in course.

Sad to say, this anomaly appears to be quite widespread these days, with many people either just being idle or quite busy but more in the mechanical sense. We don’t have to look far to validate this observation.

“Tambay” is precisely our local argot to refer to the large mass of people, even young people, who are simply standing by, doing nothing and just waiting for things to happen. We still have a lot of them around.

At the other extreme, we can have our version of yuppies and other busy bodies who seem to be abuzz with action, but not knowing exactly where they are going. We also have a good number of them around.

We need to be more aware of this predicament if only to know how to solve it. It’s a problem that is first personal but is now fast becoming social. But its worst impact is nothing less than on our eternal destiny. And so, we just have to tackle it more seriously.

Obviously, we need moments of rest and action. But we just have to remind ourselves that since we are not purely material beings subject to physical laws, we ought to know when to rest and to move, what reasons and goals we ought to achieve through them. In short, there’s a heavy moral dimension to this aspect of our life.

We just cannot rest or move without any plan or purpose, other than what we may immediately feel like doing. We simply cannot determine these moments by merely physical or emotional condition. It’s not even enough to depend mainly if not solely on social or cultural expectations, though they obviously have to be factored in.

What would obviously help here is the habit of making daily, weekly, monthly and so on plans that give us a general picture of how those time frames would be spent. I wonder how many people of us make this a serious habit.

I still see a lot of people without daily plans. There are even some who are averse and hostile to the idea of making plans. It’s so very Stone Age kind of thinking to consider plans as necessarily restricting one’s freedom. They need to live in the 21st century.

But having plans is not enough. Plans give us generic indications. They need to be refined, modified, enhanced, etc., as we grapple with the concrete circumstances we meet along the way. This is where we have to contend with our tendency to either the inertia of rest or the inertia of motion.

To succeed, we need to develop a certain sensitivity that would effectively and intimately connect us not only to our best ideas, but most importantly to God, since in the end it is to him that we are supposed to offer everything that we are and that we do. It is with him that we are supposed to live always.

In short, we need to know how to go in sync with God’s abiding providence with us. And that’s the reason why we need to learn how to pray, how to contemplate, how to read signs of the times, both the remote and the immediate, etc.

We also need to learn how to be flexible, which would require that we free ourselves from certain attachments that would desensitize us to the promptings from God.

To be sure, God has a grand plan for each one of us, a plan full of value even if the elements involved may be considered as small and insignificant in human and worldly terms.

But it’s a plan that can only be driven by love, that all-consuming passion that constitutes the essence of God and ours too, since we made in God’s image and likeness.