On Inertia, the Perfect Moment, and Basha
TL;DR: Stop waiting for opportunities that may or may not come. Instead, look at the opportunities of the now and take action!
After posting my previous article, I felt awesome. Here I was, doing something new and totally out of my comfort zone, broadcasting it to be seen to x number of people. I was ecstatic! I was happy that I finally voiced out my thoughts. Happy that I finally got to get my head out of the clouds, and happy that I finally created something. “This is pretty great” I thought. I’ll definitely write more articles.
It’s been around two months since my previous post, and no new ones since then. What happened?
This situation isn’t new to many of us. We’ve all made the promise to change ourselves for the better at one point in our lives. Whether it’s a New Year’s Resolution to diet and exercise, or a promise never to cram a paper again, we say that we’ll achieve it. Promise. Reality shows us that rarely do we follow through on these things. Even I’ve been doing this for quite some time! I tend to daydream of things that I could do for the day, week, month or even year, thinking that it would be nice to actually do them. Feeling a sense of satisfaction for having thought about it, I let the thought linger for just a few minutes, until I lose motivation to do anything about it and it disappears.
Inertia
I’d like to think of this similar to Inertia. As per the very “reliable” source Wikipedia, Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in its position and state of motion. In order for the object to be in motion, it must be acted upon by a greater force. Similar to how objects remain at rest, many of us are at rest prior to the change we want to happen to ourselves. It takes much effort to get ourselves out of that because we are what keeps us there. Simply entertaining thoughts of what could be is enough for us, or so we’re deceived into thinking. Or worse, we convince ourselves that the perfect moment just hasn’t arrived yet, hence our inaction.
The Perfect Moment
Thing is, that perfect moment is a myth. A lie. Fake news. In today’s world, there are far too many choices of what can be. Our mind imagines a life that we could have with all of them. In doing so, we create this idealized dream for ourselves that would need the perfect moment to bring us there. If the perfect moment isn’t there, we don’t do anything. We remain at rest.
News flash: Perfect moments are never handed to you on a silver platter. You need to take action today. Which I failed to realize. Over the past few months, I believed that the perfect opportunity would come. All I had to do was wait. I failed to realize that there were opportunities I could have done today had I simply pulled myself back into reality. Sad isn’t it? It was in engrossing myself in what could be that I failed to take action to get there.
Now What?
It doesn’t have to be a major step to get to where you want to be. These things take time and patience. What matters is that you chunk what you want to achieve into smaller steps, accomplishing them one by one, and slowly but surely building momentum. You can make progress on your goals even when there doesn’t seem to be a perfect opportunity. Make one! Want to be an author some day but you’re doing something completely unrelated? Spend some time each day writing a line or a paragraph about something. Want to be a speaker, yet your work doesn’t let you interact with people face to face? Learn how to structure information in a way that you can get your point across.
Point is, you don’t have to do everything all at once. You don’t have to make that big leap. All you need is to take that first tiny step and keep going. As a wise person once said, “I want to stop wondering ‘what if,’ — I want to know ‘what is.’” (Basha, 2007). There’s so much that we can do to head towards our goals even if things may seem far away. We only need to realize that it doesn’t take a perfect moment for us to get there.
So what’s your goal? How can you chunk it so that taking a step in the present isn’t as intimidating? If you want a push to help you towards that goal, even just to remind you that you have to do something for your goal, feel free to reach out. Even that can be your first step. Easy right?
All the best!
