I’m a fan of Newton’s First Law of Motion (btw, the other two laws are nowhere nearly as good. My theory is he wrote them not because his heart was in it, but because books and movies are often easier sell as a trilogy. You can almost hear his agent saying, “Isaac, nobody’s going to go for this unless you come up with another two laws. If you can, put something in there about gravity. It’s going to be the next big thing.”)
But his first law is something I can relate to on a number of levels. What is it?
Inertia. Or:
“Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed”.
I think he should’ve phrased it differently, something along the lines of:
“Don’t move unless you really, really, reeeeeelly have to. And then just enough to keep everybody happy.”
That’s depressing – one succinct sentence that sums up my entire life so far…
I always thought writing was a solitary profession. But over the years, I’ve come to realise that meetings play a huge part of my working life. While I write this (to quote Newton), I’m in a “state of being at rest”. However, this week sees a “force impressed” in the form of a number of meetings.
I find meetings daunting for a number of reasons:
- The person I’m meeting always has the upper hand – they’re used to working and talking with…(*gulp*)…other people.
- Daylight is unfamiliar and disconcerting. Shielding my eyes and squinting, I shuffle cautiously into the meeting room like a Morlock trying to enter a tanning salon.
Curiously, after the first is over, the enjoyment of meetings and pitches then become my “state of being at rest”, and the “force impressed” is the return to my dimly lit cave.
Still, it’s these glimpses of this outside world that keep us trapped in the gravitational pull of our PCs or laptops or whatever it is we use to get the words to stick to the page.
Gravitational pull? Hey we’ve come full circle. And speaking of circles, let’s talk about Kepler…
