Quote

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

Mary Catherine Bateson

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Mary Catherine Bateson
Age: 81 †
Born: 1939
Born: December 8
Died: 2021
Died: January 2
Anthropologist
Writer
New York City
New York
Mary C. Bateson
Answers
Sharing
Fragmentary
Pleasure
Complexity
Vertigo
Within
Patterns
Savor
Making
Findings
Coherence
Without
Finding
Multiplicity
Ones
Recognizing
Playing
Opens
Learning
Pleasures

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The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.
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Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere.
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... as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. ... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.
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The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
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Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined.
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Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
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We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
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Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.
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The caretaking has to be done. Somebody's got to be the mommy. Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.
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Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
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Improvisation and new learning are not private processes they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.
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In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
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...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.
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I had repeatedly accepted inappropriate burdens, stepping in to do what needed to be done. In retrospect, I think I carried them well, but the cost was that I was chronically overloaded, weary, and short of time for politicking, smoothing ruffled feathers, and simply resting.
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
Mary Catherine Bateson
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Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.
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Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
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