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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONImprovisation 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.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.
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When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.
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There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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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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Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
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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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The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
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What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
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We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
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In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
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Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.
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Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked into the design of every life, meeting an individual need as well as a pervasive need in society.
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Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON