Estimated Reading Time 7 Minutes
Hey You! I’m Emily Romrell and this is The Vibrant Life Podcast. I hope y’all have had a great week. I’m doing good. I loved watching General Conference last weekend. If you missed it you can find a link in the show notes. It’s definitely worth checking out if you need a little more inspiration in your life.
And if you need a little more organization in your life, you should check out The Vibrant Life Goal Planner. This all-inclusive goal tracker, calendar, and personal journal will maximize your potential and help you create a vibrant life you truly love. Again just check out the show notes or you can visit my website EmilyRomrell.com.
Alrighty, onward and upward. Today I’m getting a little sciencey on you. One thing I’ve noticed is that many of the practical physical laws in science have universal truth that can also be applied spiritually and emotionally. There is an order to the way things work and you can see the patterns if you take the time to look for them. And often, it’s these patterns that have led to further discoveries in various fields of science and other disciplines. Someone noticed how something worked and then they applied it somewhere else to see if that might not also work. It’s miraculous how everything fits together.
This kind of thinking is what drove Einstein and others to look for their Theory of Everything. I’m not a scientist and I couldn’t do the math if my life depended on it. But I love reading about science and the amazing discoveries people are making. I have no idea if there really is a unifying theory that will tie all of our understanding together, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I believe that God works through natural laws to do his work and for me, the intricate order in life and the beauty in the world are signs that we really do have a loving Heavenly Father who designed this experience called life for all of us.
We’re diving into something much easier today and that is The Law of Inertia. This is also referred to as Isaac Newton’s first law of motion. You probably remember learning about this in school. Basically, any object at rest will stay at rest and an object in motion will stay in motion unless they are acted upon by an outside force like friction or gravity or interference from a human being. In this episode, we’ll take a look at how The Law of Inertia not only applies to inanimate objects, but it’s a principle that governs our personal lives as well.
Quick sidenote (I’m a sucker for trivia and random facts, so maybe this will help you in a board game someday): Newton stated The First Law of Motion as he was defining physics, but it was actually Galileo who first formulated the principle. Newton was born on Christmas day in 1642 and that was the year Galileo died at age 77. We all build off of each other, right? Galileo has a great quote where he says, ” All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” And a saying that’s attributed to Einstein says, “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” That’s another great thing about things that are really true. They are simple. Discovering truth can be messy at times, but ultimately if a thing is true, it’s simple and easy to understand. In The Book Of Mormon there are 9 different references to truth being ‘plain and precious’.
I really love that. Because while I like to think that I’m relatively intelligent, it’s the small simple things in life that touch my heart and soul that are the most real to me. Have you ever heard someone say something or maybe read something in a book and in your soul you just kind of felt, “Yeah, that’s true.” I think as humans we underestimate our abilities and we can often sense truth even if we can’t scientifically explain it. Don’t get me wrong. I am a big believer in science, and experienting, and gathering evidence. But like the King points out in the musical The King and I: It’s very interesting how science and religion often ends up with the same conclusion even though they used different methods of reasoning to get there. It’s something to think about.
Sorry Peeps, I went off on a little tangent there. But these are the kinds of things I like to ponder about from time to time. Let’s get back to inertia. Think about a space movie like Star Wars or a tv show like Star Trek. You can probably visualize something that’s been floating in space for a really long time. It will just keep floating on forever until it bumps into something else. But what happened in the first place to set it in motion? Well, either a star exploded, or asteroids collided, or maybe a rocket was launched from down here on earth. But there was some kind of energy burst that started the object on it’s course.
Now let’s think about our daily lives and the routines we live by. You know the human body loves routine. We all have our biological clocks or our circadian rhythms, right? If you don’t know, circadian rhythms are just a fancy way of saying that we live on a 24 hr cycle that syncs up with the 12 hrs or sunlight and 12 hrs of darkeness each day. Even if you don’t put a big focus on habits, you have them. Even if you have a flexible job and a flexible schedule, chances are you tend to do the same things at about the same times because you’re built that way. You like to eat the same kinds of foods at around the same times. You may or may not exercise at around the same time of day. You have your favorite tv shows that come on at the same time. You hang out with your friends on similar days of the week.
Think of the way you’re used to doing things as you at rest. You may be really at rest most of the time if you’re not an active person, but you might also be at rest because you are in your comfort zone. If you want to change, then it’s going to take energy to put your life on a different course. Sometimes we deliberately choose to make changes and gather our energy from within ourselves. That’s being proactive and it’s amazing. But sometimes outside forces impact us. People in your life will make choices that affect you. Weather can change things in the form of a sunny day or a natural disaster. Different cultures have different ways of doing things. Governments definitely play a big role in our lives. We can’t always control what happens to us and that can be frightening. But the good news is that we always have a choice in how we respond to what happens. That’s where the power is. We’re not simple objects, we have minds and we can be deliberate with how we spend our energy.
Let’s go back to that proactive bit and talk about what we can do if we do want to make a change. It’s not easy. If your body is at rest and you’re comfortable then you will experience resistence. That’s where motivation comes into play , right? That’s when it’s important to visualize what we want and gather our strength and really push our limits. But The Law Of Inertia is a law of hope. Because your effort and energy is rewarded when you form new habits. And once you are firmly on that path you will tend to say on the path until another change comes.
If you’ve been listening to the podcast you’ve probably heard me talk about being on an upward spiral. I really like that image. And when you visualize that you can easily imagine a spring or maybe a slinky.
I loved playing with slinkies when I was a kid. We’d take a slinky up to the top of the stairs and have races to see which one would go the farthest. Springs are coils of energy that love to keep on going in the right conditions.
Sometimes when we’re in the middle of the daily grind, it’s difficult to see that we’re making any progress. But I like to visualize that spiral or that spring and our daily grind is the time that we are bringing everything together and after a certain amount of time we get that burst of energy and launch forward. For me anyway, life is often like that. Things will just start to feel like they’re going smoothly and then something triggers the spring and a change seems very sudden. But really it has been coming for a long time.
Obviously, we don’t live in a vacuum and different forces are influencing us constantly. But even so, The Law of Inertia is a real power that plays a major role in our lives. If we can channel that power then staying on course is much, much easier. That’s why habits are so crucial. If we create patterns of action in our lives, then we are likely to stay with those patterns until a new force comes along. And if it’s an outside force that we can’t control, we can at least control our response.
This is something that I struggle with. I am far from perfect and I find myself at rest too often when I want to be in motion. But I know that this life is not about being perfect. Living life is a process that allows us to grow into our potential and down the road, we can eventually become perfect. But when I think about scientific laws in nature and how they correspond to spiritual laws that improve my life I am filled with hope. I hope you can feel that too.
Thanks for being here with me on the podcast. It means a lot to me that you spend a few minutes each week as we work on creating our vibrant lives together. I hope this next week brings you lots of those little moments that mean the most. Take care, and I’ll see you next time on The Vibrant Life Podcast.
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