Article December 9, 1985 Issue

No inertia in our growth Spiritward

DORINDA REED STALEY

Our first skiing lessons had been a great success, and every member of the family was enthusiastic about learning and sharing a new sport. Now, two years later, everyone had graduated to steeper slopes and greater challenges. Everyone but me. Discouraged and disappointed, I practiced on the novice slopes but seemed to get worse rather than better.

One morning I stopped to rest near a class of beginning skiers and overheard their instructor reminding them to use the momentum gained on the slope to control their movements. Suddenly I realized that I had been resisting that momentum rather than using it. I had been carefully following standard ski instructions but unconsciously resisting going down the mountain—the very thing I had ridden up the mountain to do! Immediately I made an effort to drop that resistance, and by the very next day I was skiing happily on intermediate slopes.

This experience seemed to hold a broader message for me—one that applied to my growth Spiritward. Speaking of God as Mind, the one divine intelligence, the one infinite cause, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "Mind is the source of all movement, and there is no inertia to retard or check its perpetual and harmonious action." Science and Health, p. 283. This had always been a favorite passage from the textbook, but I had never paid much attention to the word "inertia." Now it stood out. One definition of inertia is "indisposition to motion, exertion, or action." The subtle resistance that had retarded (even checked) my progress as a skier was a form of inertia.

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