Maria Popova's Blog, page 17

Erik Erikson’s Stages of Human Development: The 8 Basic Conflicts That Shape Who We Are

It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice cream and orgasms, gets to yearn and to suffer and to love.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing about being alive is that we are never finished and compl...

How We Become Ourselves: Erik Erikson’s 8 Stages of Human Development

It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice cream and orgasms, gets to yearn and to suffer and to love.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing about being alive is that we are never finished and compl...

How to Triumph Over the Challenges of the Creative Life: Audubon’s Antidote to Despair

We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history contributes to this willful blindness, obscuring the tremendous personal cost behind some of humanity’s most triumphant achievements — the great discoveries, the great symphonies, the great paradigm shifts. This is not to say that suffering is a prerequisite for greatness — I don’t subscribe to the dange...

Curiosity as an Instrument of Love: Thoreau and the Little Owl

“If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others.”

Among the things I most cherish about science is the way it anneals curiosity. True curiosity is an open wonderment at what something is and how it works without emotional attachment to the outcome of observation and experiment. It is only when we cede emotional attachment that we can be truly free from judgment, for all judgment is feeling — usually some species of fear — masquerading as thought. And when...

Winnicott on the Psychology of Democracy, the Most Dangerous Type of Person, and the Unconscious Root of Resisting Women Leaders

In the late morning of the first day of August in 2023, exactly twenty summers after I arrived in Philadelphia as a lone teenager from a country thirteen centuries America’s senior, I experienced that wonderful capacity for self-surprise as tears came streaming down my face in a windowless government office. I had taken the naturalization ceremony to be just the final checklist item on a long and tedious bureaucratic process. But standing there between an Ethiopian family holding a newborn and a...

From Stars to Souls: The Science of What Made You You, with a Dazzling Poem Read by David Byrne

“Look at the clever things we have made out of a few building blocks — O fabulous continuum.”

We are each a chance constellation of elements forged in long-dead stars assembled by gravity, which may be the other word for God — the weakest of the four fundamental forces, yet the great cosmic compactor that made the first atoms cohere into a common center to form the first star: an immense ball of gas, at the core of which was a hydrogen sphere that eventually reached pressures of millions of atm...

The Consolations of Chronodiversity: Geologist Turned Psychologist Ruth Allen on the 12 Kinds of Time and How to Be More Fully Alive

“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem “Possibilities.” Our preferences, of course, hardly matter to time — we live here suspended between the time of insects and the time of stars, our transient lives bookended by not yet and never again. Time baffles us with its elasticity, the way it slows down when we’re afraid and speeds up as we age. It harrows us with its stagnancy, the way waiting twists the psyche. It haunts us wit...

Between Encyclopedia and Fairy Tale: The Wondrous Birds and Reptiles of 18th-Century Artist Dorothea Graff

Imagine a world of constant wars and deadly plagues, a world without eyeglasses, bicycles, or sanitation. Imagine being a gifted child in that world, knowing you are born into a body that will never be granted the basic rights of citizenship in any country, into a mind that will never be allowed to expand in any institution of higher learning.

Dorothea Maria Graff (May 13, 1678–May 5, 1743) was born into such a world.

Red-crowned crane by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)

Thro...

An Illustrated Ode to Love’s Secret Knowledge

When Dante wrote of “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” he was shining a sidewise gleam on the secret knowledge of the universe, the knowledge by which everything coheres. All love is an outstretched hand of curiosity reaching for knowledge — a tender acknowledgement of a reality that is not yourself and a lively interest in its interiority. Bertrand Russell captured this in his essential distinction between “love-knowledge” and “power-knowledge,” for it is only by means of love t...

The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning

One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend’s dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky on her back. In the years since, the heron has become the closest thing I have to what native traditions call a spirit animal. It has appeared at auspicious moments in my life, when I have most yearned for assurance. It became the first bird I worked with in my almanac of divinations. At times of harrowin...