There is a time in life that one learns something FOREVER. Once learned, there it sits, written on those petrified molecules  in the brain. Let them talk about plasticity, dynamic interaction, epigenetics, biochemical interaction, pruning, sprouting, reconstruction and reconfiguration ....it all may be true but there is some information that magically endures all those storms. Among those durable bits of information, there are some that actually become reliably solid, permanent like the North Star.
Well,  in my brain I may have a couple of those beacons and one is the very definition of inertia. It would have been an easy one to discover, once the concept is understood, there is no doubt into what it means, just that motion that keeps things up ongoing despite themselves. We've all experienced coins rolling down the table...but it so happens that the definition engraved in my bendable brain is a rather convoluted paragraph in imperial Castilian, as I'm a  Franco's era pupil. Inercia es la incapacidad que tiene la materia para modificar su propia velocidad. A gross translation would read: "  inertia is the incapacity of the matter to ever change its own speed". That emphasis on the negative is, by the way, typical of that era, and it is what makes that paragraph so contundent and durable, I think.
The thing is that I have lived for 50 years listening to that inner announcement and from time to time I indulge myself in a reflection or two about the matter, and about the inertic energy that can take me and everything else to infinity and beyond.
How powerful inertia can be and, scary, how it can also command people's actions.
I can see a point in the volitional scale, where the control of dependent variables starts fading and an action  conceived as a mere airy idea of a possibility, after thoughtful planning, may gradually become so convincing (specially if shared among deared people) that it fattens and gains a kind of  a specific weight. Actually what once was a wish, if properly nursed, sometimes it erects, standing by itself and becomes "a must". It changes its state from gas to solid. Once that happens, it finds its place on the shelf  of "things to be done". Then,  despite the appearance of new variables (at that point dependent or independent) which could alter the course of events or even counsel against that wish to become true,  the invincible inertia is already at the core of the matter, running the show and by definition, nothing will ever stop it.
I'm convinced that that kind of inertia is to blame for why I'm in the cold winter of New Zealand today, driving on the "wrong" side of the road, holding a phone that lights up my way in the city of Wellington in the left hand, while my right is trying to steer and uses the light indicators when actually are windshield wipers what I'm trying to activate! That stubborn inertia is why these days I'm in a small gray car dodging windy rain from one crisis site to another crisis site to ... do what? Well not to be pretentious but  maybe to save a life. May be to prevent that damned inertia from engulfing and driving another poor soul's desire, and  this time if it wins it could lead to eternal death. Talk about incapacity...
yeah!, Oh  inertia, you are  powerful indeed.