Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes & Sayings

We never promised we would stay the same,/But only we would shape our change/From this now single clay.[p. 82] — Mary Catherine Bateson

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. [p. 88] — Mary Catherine Bateson

Traditionally in American society, men have been trained for both competition and teamwork through sports, while women have been reared to merge their welfare with that of the family, with fewer opportunities for either independence or other team identifications, and fewer challenges to direct competition. In effect, women have been circumscribed within that unit where the benefit of one is most easily believed to be the benefit of all. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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. — Mary Catherine Bateson

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a really nice man who wishes she were not. — Mary Catherine Bateson

A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training. — Mary Catherine Bateson

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Real winners in a rapidly changing world will be those who are open to alternatives and able to respect and value those who are different. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

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

As people grow older, some of the ways they have contributed in the past may no longer be possible, but the challenge to society is not only to provide help and care where these are needed but also to offer the opportunity to contribute and care for others [p. 8] — 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

After all, most of us have lived lives based on commitments made without any way of knowing where they would lead. The uncertainty is an essential element in commitment, the acceptance of consequences an essential element in fidelity. [p. 80] — Mary Catherine Bateson

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Active wisdom
an entire cohort with something new to offer to the world as years of experience combined with continuing health. [p. 52] — Mary Catherine Bateson

A glad welcome to this affirmation by a group of psychologists that the self does not stop at the skin nor even with the circle of human relationships but is interwoven with the lives of trees and animals and soil; that caring for the deepest needs of persons and caring for our threatened planet are not in conflict. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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 Bateson

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

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

Self-care should include the cold shower as well as the scented tub. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas,enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

So this little boy was
I became her confidant a little too early, I think. It didn't seem to warp me exactly, but it left me with a little too much knowledge at an early age. [p. 143] — Mary Catherine Bateson

Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

Moving is both liberating and debilitating. Undertaken too late, it is a very stressful process, one that sometimes seems to catapult people into frail old age, and undertaken too soon, it may preempt other possibilities. [p. 38] — Mary Catherine Bateson

Sorting gets harder as time goes on
it requires a sort of ruthless decisiveness, while indecision results in endless dithering. Five moves, they say, equal a fire. But those who haven't moved may begin to need a fire. [p. 38] — Mary Catherine Bateson

It's all about being in control of myself as an older woman who lives alone, and it's all about how I am going to do what I have to do to be as strong as I can be and be confident that I can do what I need to do as an older person. [p. 62] — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

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. [p. 199] — Mary Catherine Bateson

Often continuity is visible only in retrospect. — 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. [p. 31] — Mary Catherine Bateson

Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food. — Mary Catherine Bateson

The family is changing, not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors. — 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

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 human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizing, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

An encounter with other cultures can lead to openness only if you can suspend the assumption of superiority, not seeing new worlds to conquer, but new worlds to respect. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Sharing is sometimes
more demanding than giving. — Mary Catherine Bateson

For some of us, "chauvinism" is simply a shortening of "male chauvinism." For others, it is a reminder of the dangers of devotion to the superiority of any group, gender, race, religion, or nation, or even to the truths of any era. — Mary Catherine Bateson

It is not necessarily ominous that the formal family dinner is declining in many households or becoming limited to special occasions. We might be better off if we could separate food as nourishment and pleasure from food as the currency of care that leaves so many woman laboring long hours to prove affection in that semantic muddle called nurturance. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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. — Mary Catherine Bateson

A certain amount of friction is inevitable whenever peoples of different customs and assumptions meet.... What is miraculous is how often it is possible to work together to sustain joint performances in spite of disparate codes, evoking different belief systems to affirm that possibility. — Mary Catherine Bateson