Ode To Moms.

"And since we all came from a woman,
Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman.
I wonder why we take from our women,
Why we rape our women,
Do we hate our women?"

-Tupac Shakur

How to teach them young.

Have you ever read a book - or a blog post - and come away from the experience with the sense that you learned something; that the experience enriched you?

It is not difficult for most to imagine that the bulk of human learning takes place after we are born. This is easy to imagine because it is true. We do not learn to hold a pencil - nor to clack on a keyboard - until years after our birth. Manual writing with a pencil is most frequently taught in schools in kindergarten, or a bit earlier than that, in the case of active parenting. Typing, by contrast, tends to be taught even later - most frequently in third or fourth grade. Although this is changing in many instances toward an earlier learning age itself, it is still broadly true that typing is taught later than is manual writing.

Writing is critical in the storage and refinement of thoughts, ideas, dreams, and aspirations. This is true on the personal level as well as the societal - and what's more, it is true on the scale of the whole of human history. Written words have also been crucial in the advancement of human collaboration and cooperation since their inception. Thanks to written instructions, a manufacturer's assistant need not always be present when you assemble your Ikea furniture.

Did you really need those instructions, though? Or were you able to infer a lot of how it went, using the instructions as a guide?

How to start early.

While it is so that most learning occurs in the post-uterine state of life, not all learning does.

Most human fetuses have developed hearing by around 30 weeks' gestation. In the period between this development, and birth at around 40 weeks, fetuses show signs of learning - first picking up on peaks and dips in their mothers' voices. After establishing a pattern-based system of understanding the mother's voice and tones, it follows that an alert fetus with nothing to do but listen, wait, absorb, and synthesize would do exactly those things with all of their time.

It is using this innate pattern recognition ability - which many of us are becoming increasingly aware of within ourselves - that many of our young begin to piece together the basics of language from within the mother's womb. Many babies are able to demonstrate things that they have learned in-utero, at birth. They are able to demonstrate a preference for the mother's voice, as well as recognition of stories told and languages experienced during gestation.

This means that, from the very beginnings of life, our mothers are shaping our future minds. While they are not responsible for every last thought we think, what a mother is exposed to - both intentionally and otherwise - during our gestation, strongly shapes both the initial mental state with which we enter the world, and the early life circumstances which will solidify, shift, or otherwise alter our thoughts further downstream.

Have you ever compared a tree's roots to its branches and noticed a similarity?

How to build a team.

If "as above, so below" were applied to thought, how would that look to you?

Since the written word is the great catalyst of human collaboration, thought must be the catalyst of writing. Writing is thought, captured in solid form. In this solid form, our words will outlast us.

Consider van Gogh, Gregor Mendel, and Hypatia of Alexandria. Van Gogh and Mendel went largely unrecognized during their respective lifetimes, and while Hypatia was recognized during hers, her teachings carried long into time following her assassination. Hypatia's legacy survived through collaborative word of mouth story and insight sharing with and through her students, yes, but also through the writings which she left behind and which were later picked up by other reverent scholars of antiquity. Likewise, Mendel influenced a small circle of monks, family, and friends during his lifetime, while much of his foundational work on genetics flew under the radar for some 200 years post-mortem.

Most are familiar with van Gogh and his great struggles during life - and also his brilliance, unique amidst even the starriest of night skies. His work is among the most recognizable of all time, and many continue to draw inspriation from it, even today.

Each of these three titans' works has gone on to influence and shape the works of others since - in the case of Mendel, the field of genetics was born.

Hypatia inspires women and scholars of all stripes, and van Gogh carries the torch for the tortured.

Through their drive and their purpose, they imprinted not only their own - but also their mothers' - best and brightest thoughts onto the shared psyche of humanity for as long as our species continues to persist.

If our mothers have shaped our minds since before our births, then what better way to celebrate her than to solidify and collaborate on our thoughts on her behalf?

How to deliver.

What a fascinating species we are. We begin growing before we are born, and we continue to collaborate after our time here ends.

Beginning from our first self-iterations, enabled by the safety our mothers' bodies provide us, we learn. We do this first physically, through response to nutrient abundance and deficiency cycles; later mentally, through extrauterine data absorbed auditorily. We continue these processes, informed by that initial in-utero experience we shared with our mothers, for life.

Our world exists. Things exist within our world. Our mothers did not create the world, nor did they create that which lies within. But they did create us as we lay within, and in doing so, gave us the lens through which we receive and perceive the world.

If you've ever felt the whoosh of a thought, and wondered where it came from; or the eureka of an epiphany, and felt yourself a genius; remember that while you likely are gifted (as I believe many to be) - and while that thought may have been sparked by divinity or by some other difficult-to-describe mechanism - it also might have been catalyzed by some of the moms in your life holding your hand and acting as your shield and your beacon.

Happy Mother's Day to all of those mothers, women, and involved parents who serve in flexible roles to ensure the safety, survival, and harmonic betterment of our species' young.