Mary Catherine Bateson - Composing a life (1989)

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In many ways, constancy is an illusion... Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

Mary Catherine Bateson
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.

Mary Catherine Bateson
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.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined.

Mary Catherine Bateson
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.

Mary Catherine Bateson
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.

Mary Catherine Bateson
If you compare statistics on different types of households, you find that the presence of an adult male means more additional work for the woman than the presence of a child under ten, even when the man believes himself to be sharing the housework equally.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.

Mary Catherine Bateson
If your opinions and commitments appear to change from year to year or decade to decade, what are the more abstract underlying convictions that have held steady, that might never have become visible without the surface variation?

Mary Catherine Bateson
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
Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

Mary Catherine Bateson
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
Since few people arrive at retirement with an understanding that this transition will involve a rethinking of who they are, an interim pattern has emerged, in which travel offers a way of fulfilling deferred daydreams of adventure while the next stage takes shape.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.

Mary Catherine Bateson
When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children.

Mary Catherine Bateson