Inertia – “a property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force”

Satori – “sudden enlightenment and a state of consciousness attained by intuitive illumination representing the spiritual goal of Zen Buddhism”. 

The idea of combining the two came to me one day sixteen years ago when I was sitting, thinking, in my mother’s basement about motivation, and specifically why I wasn’t motivated to find a job. As I thought about it I realized I was motivated, but only motivated to sit in my mother’s basement and play video games. There was a lot of talk from the people upstairs (my parents) that I had to try harder, that I could do better. The truth was I was doing the best I could at that time, if I could do better I would, if I had the internal motivation to try harder I would.

I found I had to differentiate between internal and external motivation and realize that only internal motivation will enlighten me and this internal motivation is usually spurned by some outside action or occurrence. This action, this external force, shouldn’t be confused with some form of external motivation; I could be told to go back to school and get my BA a thousand times but I was fine with doing nothing, waiting to go follow a band around. It was only when Jerry Garcia died, the outside occurrence, that my uniform motion, or lack of, changed. The new path it sent me on was to go back to school and do more with my life. The action of Garcia dying caused sudden enlightenment on my part and I became internally motivated to move on from my mother’s basement and enter the next chapter of my life; I hit a wall and it woke me, got me up and out the door.

I began to think of other times in my life that something happened and sent me in a new direction, that there were outside occurrences happening all around me that had brought me to any given moment in my life and that the internal motivation to make the changes, to take the paths I took, were manifested by the, conscious or unconscious, “intuitive illumination” of these forces that acted upon me. It gave me some comfort that their was a rhyme and a reason to everything that had happened to me and that I could survive in the stoicism that says “there is a reason for it all”.