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# Inertia
- URL: https://icefrontiers.com/inertia/
- Published: 2025-12-07T04:09:35.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T00:47:43.000Z
- Description: From relationships to climate.
- Author: Jean Peccoud
- Tags: Logbook

## Context

Sometimes, old writings resurface at the right time.

I found these lines in a notebook I kept many years ago—long before Ice Frontiers existed, long before I imagined sailing north or thinking seriously about the environment.

Back then, I wrote to express the difficulty of steering two lives toward each other as we get older.

Reading it now, the maritime analogy feels even more relevant to climate and all the slow forces that shape our lives long after we’ve lost the illusion of control.

## Notebook entry

We live one life.  
And the course of ours has been set by the choices we made.  
Accidents of history that shaped us.  
A long time ago, we might have been able to steer our lives on convergent trajectories.  
Not anymore.  
  
We are like these gigantic ships that are so heavy they can only go straight.  
Inertia is all we have left.  
Inertia now rules the courses of our lives.  
  
We carry the weight of what we have given.  
First, we gave ourselves to science and music.  
A little older, we gave ourselves to our spouses.  
And then, to our children.  
Now we carry their weight.  
It is so heavy that we can give no more.  
More weight, and we would break when the sea gets rough.  
  
The pace is all we can still adjust.  
A little slower, a little faster, depending on the weather.  
Still, a lot of energy does not get anywhere much faster.  
And idling hardly slows us down.  
Inertia rules the pace of our lives as well.  
  
We embarked on lonely voyages we did not choose.  
Once in a while we see a coastline or an island that fuels fantasies of a life on land.  
Once in a while we see the sails of other ships on different courses. We wonder what it would be like to go there with them.  
  
We spend most of our lives hoping we don’t hit an uncharted reef and that the weather will spare us.  
We spend most of our time caring for the precious cargo we carry with us, choosing to take it a little further while we still can, on a course that is ours, but that we no longer control.

## Postscriptum

Rereading these lines now, I realize I was describing more than a relationship.

I was describing an entire human condition and, unknowingly, the condition of our planet.

We speak of personal inertia, societal inertia, climate inertia: the heavy, slow momentum of systems too large to turn quickly.

Just as we cannot foresee the consequences of the choices we make when we are young, we could not comprehend the consequences of the choices our societies made in their own adolescence.

We were all doing the best we could with the maps we had. We were sailing uncharted waters. So let’s make peace with the development choices we made. We meant well. We did not know better.

And still—

We can adjust the trim of our sails.  
We can slowly move the throttle back.  
We can gently alter our heading.  
With a little luck, we won’t sink.

Logbooks record where we are.  
Sometimes they remind us how we got there.

As I prepare my own routes north, I’m becoming increasingly aware that this voyage is not the future I once envisioned for myself.

Yet it is the natural continuation of currents set in motion long ago: a trajectory shaped by choices, ideas, and responsibilities I have been carrying, consciously or not, throughout my life.