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The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.

Mary Catherine Bateson

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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Dance Important Improvisation Join Learning Ourselves Responsible Step
The critical question about regret is whether experience led to growth and new learning. Some people seem to keep on making the same mistakes, while others at least make new ones. Regret and remorse can be either paralyzing or inspiring.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Criticism Growth Mistake Oneself Question Regret
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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Address Affirmation Conflict Development Early Finding Ourselves
Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Affirmation Education Existing Member Tradition
When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Death Parents Realization Return Time
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Capacity Commitment Democracy Essential
Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Philosophy Retrospect Visible
The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Empowerment Future Leadership Present
The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Change Family Metaphor Understand
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

Answer Finding Fragment Learning Pattern Pleasure Share
What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Ability Color Culture Vision World
In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Constant Illusion
As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Commitment Decision Life Morning People Pieces Yourself
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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Care Design Human Learning Need Society Work
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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Children Finding Togetherness World
Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON

Activity Artistic Community Fly Freedom Provide