People are the story they tell themselves.
(Finland is a famously introverted nation. Finnish joke: How can you tell if a Finn likes you? He's staring at your shoes instead of his own. )
Love is essential, gregariousness is optional.
Solve problems, make art, think deeply.
The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor Paradise Lost was dashed off by a party animal.
Schwartz's research suggests something important: we can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizeable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.
Solitude matters. And for some people it's the air they breathe.
Be who you are - whatever you are.
I like to call it nighttime brain: the way your mind seems to function on a different frequency than it does during daylight hours - which can be good or bad but also can lead to unexpected epiphanies or experiences that wouldn't be the same at any other time of day.
Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
Many of our problems in US maternity care stem from the fact that we leave no room for recognizing when nature is smarter than we are.