ComBining

by Nora Bateson

P30 The shape of the response needs to meet, not match, the shape of the trouble Meet=many connections in motion Match=singular static connection

To meet the shape of the trouble is an approach imbued with knowing that multitudes of contextual movements are being expressed - and shifting the possible limits of ecological communication inside the situation.

P33 Measuring a child’s math abilities with the use of a standardized test is an illustration of a fundamental misunderstanding of children, math, and tests. Children learn all day, not just in the classroom, and math is everywhere, especially where it is not relegated to numbers but instead lives in rhythms and patterns, which all children are sensitive to in different ways. Tests do not measure the child. They measure the structure of the system that relies on the test itself. I do not want to abandon my child’s curiosity in favor of a societal error.

P35 I promise to show you my whole self in so much as I can. I promise to speak and be in truth with you. I will not hide anything. I promise to learn with you and from you. I will share incomplete ideas and unknown feelings with you so that you know where I am, even when I am lost. I choose you.

Your union is an improvisational symphony. You do not know what will be required of you both in the years to come. Do you trust Nora to choose your path with you, together in integrity and love, as life carries you along? I do.

P36 The promise I make…is to hold the “you” that do not yet exist and the “you” that once was.

P39 The suffering is the consequence, not the problem. Don’t solve it.

It’s not that the schools are not good enough - it is that the next generation is being squeezed into the past.

It is not that the politicians don’t make change - it is that they are bound to keep things as they are.

P40 Stuck-ness is not a stop… There is wild compensatory movement around it. Change is everywhere all the time, this is ancient knowing. It takes a lot of changes to keep something stuck. Draw your circle around the stuck bit and then zoom out to see what it takes to brace one piece of a moving circus against all the contexts in play.

P41 Now we go into the sensual, So we can sense. Now we go into the intimacy, So we are not alone, Now we go in. Or we go out.

P55 Have I shown up with my many selves? What did I perceive I need to edit to be in communication with you? What did you need to edit to be in relationship with me? What did I cut? What has been trimmed, so that I could fit you into my illusions?

Are we teaching each other to hold back?

Would it help if I said we are learning together? Shaping each other. Unsliced, integrating, reunion. To be uncut with you. Uncut in our uncut world.

P58 How can I bring anything new with all of yesterday in me?

P59 When one uses these terms, one must remember that compassion, honesty, irresponsibility, violence, empathy, and all of those descriptions exist in the relationships, in the context - and only partially in the mysteriously combined creature sometimes referred to as the “individual“.

P60 “How can I be a better person?” - the question carries an illusion that is out of kilter with families, cultures, and histories that we are all responding to.

I would rather ask, “Who can you be when you are with me?” This is a more ecological question.

P61 What might it look like to allow the world to change in such a way that we don’t recognize ourselves in it?

P66 So I stand naked, in the fire, alone in the dark night. Warrior-ready to simply disavow the traps of materialism.

I can hold this pain with joy and wash each day with the wholeness of great-great-grandchildren who will one day play here.

May they have soil under their fingernails.

P70 The quantitative question eliminated the multiplicity of contexts, while a warm approach invites them back into the relationships. This is not a matter of assessment of who is good at what and assessing roles according to expertise. On the contrary, “finding a way“ in this situation is about the unique possibilities that occur in the relationship between particular people in that particular water on that specific day. There is no formula, no method; this realm of possibility is accessed through a sentiment of human care and imagination.

Capacity cannot be front-loaded; it is emergent.

P71 The possibilities for finding a way in emergencies are not countable, controllable, or predictable.

The solutions to the situation are entirely contingent upon detail - they are accessed spontaneously, iteratively, and simultaneously. They are as infinite as the combination of people.

P72 At the core is perception. Perception of self, perception of others, perception of the natural world, perception of what it is to be alive.

Beginning to embrace new thinking, warmer thinking - in relationships will nourish a new version of solidarity to participate in a world of vibrant, creative, and unimagined change.

P74 The capabilities unleashed when I see you in me and me in you.

This will require warmth and rigorous attention to relational integrity above the anxiety to control.

P94 I do not want to be forgiven; I want to expand my perception so that I might become sensitive whatever I did not see that allowed me to injure another person.

P100 You have to dance me out of my idea of who I am when I am with you. Let me be unpredictable.

P101 I can tell you ahead of time that I am going to seem incoherent, un-informed, irrational. I am an aberration, a nonsense…. But that is what change looks like.

The change needed looks unfamiliar, looks nothing like the existing perceptions, looks nothing like what might be called grace or profanity from this vista. You cannot trust yourself to recognize it when it kisses you. We cannot rely on this current vantage point to reveal the change - we cannot see it from here. It is not in existing language. There are no subtitles.

So where is the change? It is everywhere except where we try to make it. The trying and the making of change are contaminated with the familiar scripts and blueprints.

P105 TAUTOLOGY is a tautology. It has no gaps. No new information can get in.

Note how many tautologies are spun through language and culture that perpetuate all sorts of fallacies. The most common one is that reality, as current systems have described it, is “real” simply because it is described as such. (I.e., it’s real because it’s real; therefore, it’s real.) The next logical step of that tautology is: since what is real is really real, it is natural and cannot be changed.

These circular loops are fascinating but deadly: Perception, deception, bias, buy-in, illusion, profusion.

P108 In tree-planting, there is a doing to the natural nth-order process. In contrast, in the closure of shipping and fishing, the doing is in the industrial processes, removing their interruption of the ocean while allowing the ocean to get on with its nth-order simultaneously implicating.

P135 The question was not, “How do I get my child through fifth grade?” but, “How shall we learn together to survive in a changing world?”

P136 The most profound way to provide one’s children with an understanding of complexity is to live a life of learning together in a complex world moment by moment.

What might happen if the assumption was that there would be no individuation, that people need each other, whether they are blood kin or not?

P137 What you have never seen is harder to see, what has never been said is harder to say.

The invisible is not to be underestimated.

P142 The rub of so many paradoxes has worn down the compartment walls of my being.

Now let it be mud. There is nothing that will come otherwise.

Will we forget that it took being lost?

P145 Aphanipoiesis - a coalescing of unseen factors toward vitality

The change before the change suggests that perhaps indescribability is, in itself, an evolutionary condition, a built-in extra budget of possibility for unfamiliar formations.

P146 The problem may be carbon particles in the air, but the looong history of cultural respect being produced through material wealth has guided the behavior of rich and poor communities alike, fueling the destructive and exploitative industrial production-distribution-waste cycles.

Those subtle day-to-day subterranean learnings form and continue to form each of us.

This unseen realm is vital, non-trivial, and sacred, and it is real.

The filters of perception aligned only to strategic action obscure essential information about how submergent, inherent, unrealized information is forming. It is easier to name what is seen and strive to change it.

These pre-emergent processes are more challenging to define but at least equally necessary to consider.

P147 Insidious - issues produced through the combination of circumstances over time in unseen ways that have produced danger. “Spreading gradually or without being noticed but causing serious harm” - literal definition: “to sit in”

P149 Aphanis: obscured, unseen, unnoticed. Poiesis: to bring forth, to make. An unseen (unheard, unsmelled, unfelt… ) coalescence toward vitality.

P153 Double bind - a bind that has caught a person or an organism in a situation in which they cannot succeed without a jump in perception.

P154 Warm Data - is information that is alive and shifts within the mutual learning of all living systems.

Symmathesy - is the study of how systems learn through transcontextual mutual learning. “How is the system learning to be in this world?”

P156 The education system can be seen as a “description” of these other contexts (economy, job market, inter-generational expectations, a culture that values reductionism, history of education)

P158 The study of change is usually caught in the cultural cul-de-sac of measured differences in decontextualized outcomes; a more relational study would note that changes that have become visible or measurable are not the change itself but rather the consequence of more interrelational shiftings within a living system. The ways in which the multiple entities of a living system are continually responding to the shiftings of each other are moving potentialities for change.

P160 Any model-based guidance system will only be as good as the encoded information it uses.

P162 The difference in tone and contrasting aesthetics of communication produces a felt spectrum that holds the limits of what can be communicated in any particular relationship.

The meta-message lurking in spoken communication, architecture, media, cultural expression, arts, technologies, and inter-generational expectations create the territory where relationships can be explored.

P163 Communication is what is possible to say.

P169 This is a moment in which there is a dire need to become and live into ways of being that cannot be informed by the existing structures.

Re-wilding an ecology of ideas. Let them be many and filled with movement that allows new contact.

P173 The internal requirements of body will be conservative. Survival of the body requires that not-too-great disruption shall occur. In contrast, the changing environment may require changes in the organism and a sacrifice of conservatism.

P180 Like addiction, the continuing practices of the existing systems are shaped in the premises of insidious ideas that are so deeply woven into the basics of daily life as to be waterproof to demands for change. Premises that generate their own logic of action, such as individualism, productivity, wealth, success, efficiency, progress…

P182 The movement from a theory of change that is located in “action” to a theory of change that is located in readiness is a shift of attention from what can be “done” to achieve an outcome to how to nourish the conditions into which the organism learns to be in its world.

The underworld is full of teeming, swirling, incoherent futures. Let them brew; they are hope itself.

P184 Habits stitch the rituals and smooth assumptions of what is needed materially to produce the next day. All of life is rhythmic. Change the rhythm - change the dance.

P203 I Am a beast, a vermin, a stray. There is wilderness still coursing through my veins, synching me to life. It is from there that’s I hope to learn, not the digital beeping world.

Remind me tomorrow to be disgusted; I don’t want to be subdued by creeping acceptance.

A company with no phone number is a terrible idea. A cashless society is a terrible idea. A society that has architected a way to NOT receive complex information is in no way prepared to respond to the coming years of complexity in full bloom.

The adult thing to do now is to SCREAM. It is a matter of disrupting the algorithms that are wrapping tightly around us - like a digital boa constrictor binding its pray. Nothing less than human interaction with life itself is at stake. Our breaths are becoming shallower; the constrictions are becoming comforting.

To upheave the matrix is to do what it cannot do: meet each other face to face, person to person, breath to breath. Have long conversations about nothing important. Tell random stories, dance together, sit in silence, be there to witness birth and death. Analog contact is radical now.

Once the gloss of systemic trust is gone, you will be ready to re-find your roar.

Then, our relationship with the systems change. The curiosity, the courage, the care needed to activate awakens when there is no way to take the dehumanization anymore.

P218 I do not know what a healthy system would be like, I do not know how to long for it. How do you pack when you have no idea where you are going.

P219 Limiting of communication is built into most relationships that have abuse in them. The silencing is not voiced as a rule; it is implied and upheld in other ways. So, there is never a transcript to turn to. They never said it. They did not have to. No one spoke up, they could not do so.

Cheating in communication, to win, to take, to humiliate, to gotcha, to gaslight, to decontextualize, to trick or manipulate… these things might be the most sinister de-vitalizing practices.

P221 The real problem with assholes is that humiliation, disrespect, and descontextualized, judgmental arrogance contaminate the ecology of our communities. The overtones of life, in general, can go sour when vile, exploitative attitudes abound. Assholes underestimate the profound awe of each remarkable living being. In doing so, they escalate trouble untold. Fair enough, you may say, life is a bitch … but just keep in mind that it takes a great deal of collective tenderness to heal ecologies, asshole.

P222 A thing I can do:

Risk ruining the dinner party. Risk being a difficult friend. Risk breaking the silence.

P223 What does rejection generate? More hold back, more rejection, reductionism, despair & unseen-ness. So… Hello. To the possible giving of mutual dignity.

P227 To live through next week is to take part in a system that is destructive to the future.

Un-labeling each other is the greatest rigor and the greatest gift.

I am real, and confused, and unscripted. As such, I am no source of tricks or easy methodologies. There - in the warm data of our interactions - is where entirely unanticipated possibilities are to be found.

P233 This kind of leadership cannot be found in individuals, organizations, nations, religions, or institutions but rather between them. I have called it “liminal leadership” to highlight the relational characteristics.

P234 Needs like breathing, eating, loving, and making community, are arguably impossible to change, whereas rethinking the structure of society is merely extremely difficult.

P238 The multifaceted crisis the world faces today are proof enough that the establishment is not built to question itself.

P244 Ecologies do not need incentives. Parents do not feed their children out of an incentive.

P246 “solutionism” is not appropriate in the complexity/systems world … If you look for solutions, you won’t find them because the problem identified as needing to be solved is a consequence of multiple contextual interactions.

Food systems, sexism, climate change, addiction, racism, economic inequality, and so on are all consequences of several hundred years of exploitation. Instead, let’s talk about changing the conditions within which interrelational interdependence can take place. I use the idea of improvement in “responding” to a systemic or complex problem instead of “solving” it.

When I think of what sort of relationship I would want to be in, the idea of having a partner who wanted to “steward” me is quite unappealing. I am interested in tending to the intimacy with which every day brings the environment into my body/mind/emotion and my body/mind/emotions into the environment.

P259 I remember posh houses With umbrella holders Made of elephants’ feet.

The whole world is made of elephants’ feet. Shiny shame Once beautiful and wild

Signals of showy gore.

P262 The waste of resources in wars for resources isn’t good math.

P264 Interrupting the notion of time, So it’s possible to find Another rhythm.

P268 You never know where “development” is brewing in the many contexts of our ongoing becoming.

That non-knowing is a deep respect for other people’s complexity.

P279 Everybody knows a script when they smell one. They know they no longer have to pay attention to the conversation. They know how their own script sits in contrast.

P284 The mistakes of reductionism, the misconception of individualism, and the errors of predetermined linear outcomes of healing, all validated a slogan of “better, faster, cheaper.”

Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.

P296 A pathology is the organism’s inability to make sense of its world.

P301 The revolution will not be found in conference centers. The resonances will be and are where the pain has been - where there was no choice but to become unbreakable.

P323 It is clear to most people entering a care facility that they may receive relief from the pain they are in, but the facility cannot undo the conditions that are creating the pain in the first place. This limitation is communicated, yet it is not written anywhere.

P324 The double bind of the workforce is this: If I don’t work, I can’t live, and if I do work, I can’t tend to life, and my physical and emotional life will be damaged or destroyed. Exiting the system is not part of the system.

P327 Not to find the solution but to know that we can learn together, improvise together - and bring in many contexts and ways of knowing that loosen the double binds.

To meet the double bind is to reach into another context and try new things together, with another approach, in another tone, and toward another idea of what is possible.

“No one can do this for us, let’s figure it out.”

P330 And so we carry on in our cells the stories that no one wants to hear.

P333 Could a better understanding of complexity at an intensely personal level allow for a more immediate, embodied understanding of complexity on lager societal and ecological levels - and vice versa?

P336 Familiarity with our own complexity is a step toward the generosity of giving others permission to be complex, too.

P337 The thinking patterns of “taking”, “having”, “owning”, “leading”, “controlling”, and “winning” link competition, capitalism, colonialism, and numbness.

P339 Objectification leads to exploitation. The description of human beings as objects, for example, using the metaphor of a “role” or “resource”, is a dangerous reductionism, leaving us all vulnerable.

P349 It became clear that the survival of our species requires sensitivity to well-being across multiple cultures and species. This is a sensitivity that is unlike anything resembling predatory skills.

P351 Ecology is not instant. You cannot run to the shop and buy it.

P354 His communication from the breakfast table to the conference keynote was an endless, curious, caring, and passionate artistry of moving the ecology of communication toward a little more possibility of life to make more relations wherever he could.

P357 What is brewing that wants to come from your lips? What is the tone? What is the texture of this thing, you will say? If you take a moment and consider the words in their tone and gesture landing in this conversation, what will they bring? What do they do to the alchemy of possibility? If my words land in your ecology of communication, what do they invite? What openings does my communication bring to the conversation? What have I limited? What is closing? What have I nourished, and what have I un-communicated?

P358 Speaking out is important, and doing it with care to context is vital.

P367 I am in the moment where you wonder if the threads will come together.

P368 Let us un-thing it, un-name it, un-it “it”, finding warmth and relief in possibilities that naming and thing-ing and it-ing obscure.