BLOGGER'S BLOCK

I'd like to say I've been suffering from Blogger's Block, a real and serious condition worthy of capitalization, and maybe even a listing in Wiki. But unfortunately, I don't believe it exists.

Even its more famed and deadly cousin, Writer's Block, seems to me like a dressed-up name for fear. Or laziness. Or procrastination.

Or maybe it just means you really don't want to write at all. You want to think about writing--a much less taxing activity, that has never taken the life of a tree, or bored a single reader.

So no, I haven't had Blogger's Block. Instead, I've been conducting an unplanned (and highly successful!) experiment on the principle of Inertia.

So much of what I learned in grade school is lost forever, as I first learned when I tried to help my kids with their third grade math homework. Division of fractions? Huh? Did I ever do that? And how about diagramming a sentence? I'm sure there's a good reason to learn to do it, but I never knew what it was.

But I can still remember the morose Mrs. M. (who tippled in the paper closet,) teaching us that:

A body in motion remains in motion,

while a body at rest remains at rest

until acted upon by an outside force.

It has the kind of sing-song rhythm that made it memorable for those of us more inclined to poetry than science. If, say, the theory of relativity could have been encapsulated in a similarly catchy phrase, I might actually understand it.

But back to the scientific principle of Inertia. In life, it means something like 'if you don't begin your diet or your novel or your exercise program today, you're even less likely to begin it tomorrow...' And if you ignore your blog for five days or more, it soon becomes "a body at rest," stuck indefinitely on a poem about a bad mood.

Very interesting, no? I think it was Picasso who said that he painted every day because if he took a day off, he might never do it again.

There's a lesson in that, and now that I'm in motion again (I think), I just might take it.