Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

Her ideas are not contained by the academic tendency to suffocate the personal in the presence of an intellectual inquiry. This is not a text that lacks courage.

Staying impersonal is a cowardly way of avoiding opening yourself up for scrutinyand criticism

The way we see affects what we do, in both the broad strokes of global study, and the details of a day. Playing with the limits of our perception, our knowing, and tweaking the cultural script is like using a lemon juice wash to reveal the invisible ink and unspoken scaffolding we inhabit.

The term ‘An Ecology of Mind’ challenges me to ask myself: which thoughts are flourishing, which are composting, which are just budding, which are ready for harvesting? Also, I might ask myself, is this idea a seedling for a future learning, or a weed? What are the stimuli that came together to produce this idea?

Bees and butterflies, insects, birds, and people have color attractions that appear in plants. Did we grow to love the colors because of the plants, or did the plants increase their color because it helped their survival? Co-evolution is always biological communication.

I question now the metaphor in which seeds represent beginnings. Seeds of change, seeds of hope, and so on. Of course, in a world of linear thinking that would be the meaning ascribed to seeds. But hold on. Seeds lead us just as much into what came before as into what comes next.

Be quiet and say something.

A jungle of ideas, teeming with life, lies in-between what I thought I meant and what you heard.

Wedding rings should not be made of gold. Gold is a symbol for material desire, for ownership, and wealth, for hoarding and possessing. Gold is not lovable. It is the opposite of love. Gold is a stand-in for the sun, but the sun offers itself freely. Gold is money, collecting, stockpiling, claiming, Gold is counting beans with hunched and caved-in chest, it is hoarding the stockpile; it’s a shadowy corner.

That they were the playthings in Cupid’s mischievous chemistry experiment was not cloaked from them. Both of them understood mentally what was happening. Knowing does not matter. Once the arrows struck there was no way to reason with the runaway emotions and talk sense to them. It never matters with love, or greed, or addiction, or vengefulness, or envy. Understand all you want, the structures and the causations are totally irrelevant next to the dragons that lurk below what we think of as rational.

The crisis we face now in education is not really about what is or is not provided in the curriculum; it is not about test scores, nor is it about which universities are the most prestigious. It is, in fact, not even about knowledge.

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the problem lies at the level of thought patterns. The prescribed mode of thinking that is generated by our educational systems is not conducive to the sort of thinking that new generations should have access to. It’s a matter of delivering an obsolete form of inquiry that fails to engage with the dynamics of living complexity.

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Our household was a place where breakfast was fried eggs and fresh thoughts, a piece of music was a starting place for a day’s inquiry, the Encyclopedia Britannica took up most of the table, and the fish tank was a source of poetic counterpoint to the Balinese art on the wall. The world for me was delivered un-separated. So, clearly, school was Hell.

The ambiguity we need is unacceptable to the requirements of notions such as ‘authority,’ ‘credibility,’ and ‘expertise.’ A politician cannot build a campaign on the premise of acknowledging that the problems the country faces right now are so big that it is not possible to actually ‘know’ how to fix them. Likewise, a teacher can hardly begin a class by recognizing their lack of knowledge on the subject being taught.

But these two stances are exactly rhe ones that are necessary for an (intellectually) honest approach to the real work of leadership and education.

As a parent, I have found that the best we can do is model for our children a kind of communication that is open, vulnerable, and learning… but also we have to teach them that this relationship is not to be taken for granted. Kids have to know that most adults will expect them to be respectful without any inclination to reciprocate that respect.

There is much that we cannot teach these coming generations. They need skills we do not have to offer—advice we cannot give.

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Life is not divisible into the departments of a university, nor is our understanding of life greatly increased by standard research practices, which tend to pull their ‘subject’ matter out of the larger contexts they exist in, to facilitate focused study.

The very word ‘leadership’ has become cringe worthy. It reeks of colonialism and lopsided history-book listings of individuals successful in taking, making, and claiming. Celebrating the potency of the individual is an insatiable ghost haunting the endless array of courses and manuals for developing leaders. Our fatal flaw may be the idea that an individual or institution can single-handedly penetrate new frontiers of possibility. This is an obsolete but undead dream of heroes and rescuers pioneering innovations. Lightning bolts of imagination and strength, these so-called leaders are presented as utterly independent of their histories; as though they had fallen from the sky. The haunting seeps into what we call ambition, fueled by our wanting to be important and successful.

The danger of the world’s fascination with celebrity is that it distracts from our ability to perceive larger interactions in context. In a world in which individualism is a viable illusion, collaborative discovery is unseen.

The world may be able to use the terms of systems thinking, but some of the thinking has lost its real value and become muddled into something more akin to ‘oneness.’

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the beauty and awe that can be generated by seeing the world as a nest of millions, billions, and trillions of interdependencies interacting with each other across time and geography is profound. But, it is not a profundity that asks for vacant surrender; instead it beckons for study, for art, for active learning.

.c2 A contrast to the interconnectedness or oneness of e.g. Buddhism

The thing about numbers is that they pretend to be ‘objective,’ they carry a tone of ‘facts & figures,’ when in fact they are objectifying and are much more slippery in the stories they carry than poetry.

It would be a mistake to think that we can change our way of thinking about the larger ecology we live within by changing commerce or politics.

Some changes need to go beyond our common concepts and shared models. But its hard to go beyond those thimgs that form the basis of our thinking, that are often the fundamental building blocks of our ideas

We cannot depend upon our economic system or the political system to get us out of the horse race with collapse that we sense coming. For that we need something else. But the hitch is that it is also a mistake to think we can do it without traction in those realms.

In a world that is defined by constant change, significant effort is needed to hold any particular aspect of a system in a static pattern.

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To hold one part of a system still requires that all the relationships upon which this part is interdependent must alter to absorb the shifting. Every other interaction within the system must compensate for the lack of flexibility in one part.

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While it may be that thinking in terms of parts and wholes has served us thus far, as we look around the globe we see that there have been some oversights in our understanding of life. From ecological overshoot, to economic volatility, to human trafficking and rampant racism, there is a recurring theme of exploitation. Could our habit of separating the world into parts, which we imagine gear together to function as wholes, be contributing to the segregation of ideas, people, ecologies, and more?

Words carry culture and history; they form and confine our thoughts. Words matter.

So pervasive is the habit of applying the problem-solving methods of the engineer that the language of the entire body of systems and complexity theory has become a container for slightly higher order reductionist thinking.

all pathology is also learning. The way a symmathesy makes sense of its world is a learning process at multiple levels. But that learning is not necessarily positive or progressive in the orthodox understanding of learning. We can learn to be sick. A tree learns from its context that it needs to grow crooked. Remove the value judgment from that process and we will instead see a remarkable feat of life to survive in whatever tangle it perceives. Think

Looking through that rear-view mirror, we can justify the horror of seeking to exclude other peoples and cultures from our homes. We can say “let the Swedes be Swedish,” “keep Poland Polish,” and we can make an argument for the protection of ‘individual cultures.’ But the world is changing. This is the era of people movement. No one knows exactly how and where ecological and economic pressures will drive the millions of people who are moving.

Climate change and changing economies (e.g. overpopulated cities or abandoned mining towns) require a mobile population to deal with effectively. Unfortunately our ideas of nationality, nation states, cultures, and religions create divides and borders that gravely limit this mobility. Further, our ideal of a good life is to settle down, build a family, and so on. Not to move about without roots.

It seems to me the ultimate act of love is to allow ourselves and others to be complex. In affection and respect, I try never to pin down, sum up, pigeon-hole, label, or otherwise reduce myself or any other living system to a singular tag.

Ironically, what I write will speak of who I am. I know I cannot stop the stamp my printed words will make on my identity. I resent that. Authors often hide full manuscripts under the bed and never publish them, for good reason. I am afraid of the words in these pages; afraid they will tattoo me. I am not sure I want to lay them down. I am not sure I can stand behind them in times to come.

One reason for perfectionism that keeps us (and me) from publishing a lot and publishing early. It makes us vulnerable. But the only reason to be afraid of showing your work, the current you, is tol try and stick to the imagination of yourself that's wiser, prettier, more clever, more everything. But that imaginary person does not really exist and they cannot do the work for you. And this perfectionism slows us down and starves us of feedback and practice that helps us improve.