You Don't Learn How to Sail by Only Having Sunny Days

Excerpts from the new Team Human interview with Nora Bateson

I spoke with my great friend, systems thinker and author Nora Bateson about how embracing the “in-between” opens new possibilities for seemingly intractable challenges. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation. You can hear the whole thing by clicking below.

Douglas Rushkoff: 
Nora, you embody Team Human in a single person. There’s whole team of human beings and other species in there - your gut biome and everything - and you’re accepting of them all. The most important aspect of your work, for me, is the way you recognize the “in-between.” I always talk about how we live in this world of computers and systems that tend to value the ticks on the clock and not the space, the duration in between those ticks when we actually live. When the time goes buy. And I say that a lot because I, too, am one of those people who emphasizes the ticks. Like the men of the 16th Century who gravitated to empirical scientism, I am also afraid of that in-between. It’s like the space between each monkey bar on the playground or each rail on the ladder. Anything can happen there. 

Nora Bateson: 
But isn't that exactly it, Doug? Maybe the most important thing that my new book is actually doing is providing a place to practice — in lots of different textures and tones and forms of language and ideas — to practice what it is to take care of the possibility that is in the in between.  Okay, so what you said: anything can happen.  And that's exactly the opposite of “everything is stuck.”  So what I see is that in this in between there is vast possibility, and it's a whole realm of possibility that is virtually untouched by the kind of thinking that's so anxious and eager for desperate solution. The place they're looking for possibility is not where the possibility is.

Rushkoff: 
They're not looking for possibility. They're looking for probabilities, which has always been my problem with with AI and behavioral economics, and with captology and online algorithms. They're trying to auto tune humanity towards the most probable outcome so they can bet on it and revert us to the mean. Possibility is the enemy of people betting on the future. It's the enemy of capitalism: Possibility?

Bateson:
What do we even do with that? What do we even say about that? When, when there is this, this completely stuck system and, and so many people with beautiful hearts and minds trying desperately to get out of or find a way through the patterns that we're living in that are so destructive to each other and the future of our children and the air, the oceans, our bodies. 

Rushkoff:
And then the only place they can go, and I have empathy for them, is to become a “collapsenik” — the collapse people. I participate in some of their groups online. These are the people people who say, “well, humanity's just going to have to experience an utter collapse of civilization in order for the next thing then to be bottom up and indigenous and wonderful. And I can’t help but ask, isn’t there any possibility other than that?

Bateson:
Exactly. Isn’t there a possibility? Exactly. And that’s my point. And there is possibility. There’s enormous possibility. So, how do we become more familiar and comfortable in that place where possibility lives. 

Rushkoff: 
Right. You tell a story you tell a story in the book of getting on the wrong bus or train or something in another country with your kids and having no money. Not enough money even to get back, and not speaking the language. Which for most parents would be an opportunity to model panic for your child.  (laughter) Yeah.  And you didn't. 

Bateson:
No, just the opposite. My thinking was, okay, this is great. This is how you do lost. Right. This is what you do when you're lost.  I was very conscious of it. Because, you know, you don't learn how to sail by only having sunny days.  You have to have some stormy days.

And so I figured, the odds are good that at some point in their lives, my kids are going to experience lostness of one sort or another. Whether they're on a bus, or it's emotional lostness, or career lostness, or whatever it is. And how do you do lost?  And what is that familiarity of being lost?

Rushkoff:
And so what did you do? 

Bateson:
I told them to look out the window. Do you recognize anything? And then we finally got off. We got off at the wrong place. We got back on. And then it started to rain. And eventually we figured it out. You know, one thing just led to the next thing. If you allow for one thing to lead to the next thing, you are in “active possibility realm.”  If you already target the goal, and you only know what the goal is, and your attention is out there, you'll miss all the information that is in the detail of the moment. And there's always something. There's just always something. 

In this conversation, Nora and I talk about her new book, Combining, and the power of getting lost. You can stream this episode wherever you get your podcasts. To get an ad-free version of the show you can become a contributing member of Team Human on Patreon for only $5 per month.

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