One of the great think tanks in my life (beside my own shower) is the New York City Subway. I had a thought while riding the subway today. I watched as the subway car came to a screeching halt mid-tunnel as it so often does. Its motion was brought to a standstill by the forces that acted against it: traffic ahead, a red signal, some mass transit workers working on the tracks. We lay motionless for several moments. Then, as suddenly as we were brought to a standstill, the car began to lurch forward again in motion. I watched as the bodies of the passengers across from me jerked backward in inertia as if they had wanted to stay motionless. A momentary struggle had occurred.I realized something that I had inherently always known. There is a constant force in our lives that combats the direction in which we should be moving. We constantly work and fight to combat this natural tendency. We strive to remain in shape. If we didn't then we would be unhealthy. We fight to maintain friendships and relationships in our lives when we tend to be too busy. We fight to stay focused and accomplished when the tendency is to turn the TV on. We try to give when we want to keep. To trust when it is so easy to mistrust. To get back up again when naturally we fall.
The power to move forward in any direction is driven by our own internal desire to go places. I am sure there is someone out there that can argue the otherwise but it seems to be that the nature of our lives if not acted upon by our own desires is to remain distracted. Some of the most successful people in the world are those that recognize that natural tendency and drive every aspect of their lives in the opposite direction.
I ask. Why does it have to be this way? Why should the things that we perceive as good be such a struggle to maintain?
Perhaps my quest to climb Mt. Whitney and raise these funds is my own attempt to move in the opposite direction of things. The past three weeks I have succumbed to the natural tendency to be too busy at work, distracted by things that really don't matter, and depressed on the outcome of my fundraising. But I must remind myself to keep the motion going. After all if I didn't strive to climb to the top of a mountain then the naturally tendency would to be stuck at the bottom. Think of the perspective I would lose.
One of Newton's laws states that an object remains at rest until acted upon by an outside force. He obviously was not taking into consideration the inside forces of a human being.
I have to wonder what was he doing when he thought of that?
