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Nora it's such a pleasure to have you here and to welcome you to our conference you have been here before you are the first one to be here for the second time
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and that's for a reason uh so when you were here in 2017 you you started
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the your presentation by asking a question you asked a question how do we grasp the world so that's a typical Noah
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to make it uh yeah yeah big and at the same time going into details to uh to help us understand that the way we grasp
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also makes the possibilities that comes out of the ways we grasp the world so now you're here again and
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when when we are going to present you what kind of presentation do you want because in a way all the qualities you have and all the
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competences and so on but you are not a fond of putting things apart so why not call you a
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fence contextualizer so welcome to Nora and uh yeah we're looking forward to listen to thank you
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thank you it's so good to be here and good morning to everyone so um I'm gonna be using some new words today but don't worry because they're words
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that most people who speak English don't know either so it's all good I'd like to take you on a little bit of a journey um I'd like to start
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by having a moment to look at your hand and think about if you had grown up if you were a child
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fifteen thousand years ago what would you be doing with that hand what would your hands do what would your feet look like when what shoes would you
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you were a child 10 000 years ago in Central Asia what was your hand be doing in the day what would you touch what would you what would you make
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what would you hold in that hand if you were a child that grew up in the Pacific Northwest of what we call now
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North America 5 000 years ago what would you need to know how to do with your hand would you make things what tools would
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you use how what animals would you touch how would you use your hand in gesture of speech and I'm inviting you to explore this and
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to bring it into your body because it's very very easy to think that the world that we live in and the way that we live in the world is
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simply how it is it is not how it is and so much of our inability to actually loosen and make change to learn to do
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things differently comes in immediately with this idea of but this is how it is this is not how it is this is one version
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of how it could be so I want to just start there because before we tell our children this is the system you have to fit into
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because this is how it is let's take a moment to hold that lightly what world are we inviting our children into
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last night um I got a a call from my daughter who's living in California studying psychology don't you know and [Music]
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um for one reason or another she asked me what time of day was I born and so I wrote her and I told her what time of day she was born
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and in that question came this wash of memory of the moment when she was born and I held her in my hand in my arms and she sat there she was on
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the pillow and I remembered that night that I stayed up all night long looking at this incredible little being
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and I promised her every every I will travel with you I will show you great food we will walk together and sing together and I will dance with you
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and we will go to the great forests and we'll swim in the Cool Waters and I'll show you this beautiful world and I promised her this
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let's start with that as an image that moment of what what world I wanted to give this beautiful little being and she looked up
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at me with these big eyes and that baby could have been born 5 000 years ago could have been born in Sweden or Denmark or Central Asia or the Pacific
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Northwest it could have been born into any number of contextual processes and trans contextual processes how is this being going to shape and be shaped
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in their world if you're a tree in a forest some trees in the forest stand straight and tall and other trees in the same Forest the same kind of tree even
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might be crooked and bent and reaching and we might look at that Crooked Tree and think how do we fix that Crooked Tree that Crooked Tree needs to stand straight and Tall so it can thrive
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and in asking that question something got obscured a lot of information got lost because the question is how is this
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Crooked Tree Learning to be in its world what are the ways in which it's reaching this way and reaching that way show us how it's making sense
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of being in its world you know the sun's coming from over here and there's trees over there that cast shadows and there's animals that come this way and the hillside moves like that so of course the tree
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is reaching like this for the SE for the light there's nothing wrong with that but if you have the idea that the tree should look like this
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then we're in a question of how do we fix it this question of fixing [Music] this is an interesting epistemological place
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what is that so in the late 1700s early 1800s up through the early 1900s industrialism comes into being
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and with industrialism we get this idea that there are parts that function in Holes with a W holes not with an h and that
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those pieces must be the right shape and size to function to fit into the machine to make it go if they don't fit we have to fix them
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in the late 1800s we start to get the beginnings of what would be called Eugenics by about 1905 1906. and Eugenics comes out of biometrics Biometrics became the way of measuring
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and controlling the way that we could understand that which is normal so that we could also Define that which was abnormal and fix it or eliminate it
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okay this is long before the Nazis long before any of this long before I mean 30 years but I want to point to that because
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there's something there there's a ghost that lives in US a ghost that sneaks out and says this is how we have to fix it this is how we have to measure it
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without remembering where that came from the violence that that process came from because it was
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not about life it was about efficiency optimization standardization [Music] and that those ideas are industrial
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ideas that have to do with how you make machines work but they're not how you make life work a forest works very differently a meadow works very differently a family
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is very different where is the family is the family and the children it's the family and the parents the family and the grandparents is the family and the culture is the family in the language is the
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family in the geography is it in the economics the education levels is it in the profession is it in the era you're born in where's the family
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because you can have two parents and two kids and a household that doesn't tell you very much does it you can have two parents and two kids in a household with at this economic level
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in this culture but that doesn't tell you very much does it I mean remember the first time you went to dinner at a friend's house
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when you were a kid and you sat at their table and maybe they even had the same food that you sometimes have at your house but sitting at their table was totally
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different than sitting at your table right who talks who doesn't talk who eats first what's the vibe even the food doesn't taste the same
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the way they sit's not the same the way they smell is not the same how they are with their kids how their kids are with with their parents not the same so you start to to see
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that there's a lot of information that isn't actually findable in these compartments that have been decontextualized okay this is trans contextual
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so this is a word that my father Gregory Bates and coined and when we look at the self I think the the first question is really to ask where is the edge of the self
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where's the edge of me where's the edge of you as is the edge of me my skin is it my ideas is it my family is it my great
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grandchildren that aren't born yet is it my politics is it my my work where's the edge of me my microbiome you know there's like 400 trillion
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organisms that live in my body you know that the human body is the cells of the human body are only one tenth of them are human cells one tenth of your cells are human
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where's the edge of you so these contexts are constantly coming together and sometimes I'm standing here and I'm in my professional self
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and that may be the featured context of the moment but it isn't as though I could somehow go in my body and surgically remove the part of me that's a mom and the part of
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me that's a filmmaker and the part of me that's a daughter and the part of me that is a Californian here in Scandinavia so ultimately all of
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these contexts are mixing merging coming together I'm never not a mom I'm never not a daughter I'm never not my 400 trillion organisms
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they are shaping my Crooked Tree always this word trans contextual has been a big opening for me and uh
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I I remember I don't know whatever it was maybe 15 years ago there was a a lot of popular use of the word interdisciplinary
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transdisciplinary and I I kept feeling somehow limited by that something is not right with that um and and feeling that that limitation was
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that life doesn't take place actually in disciplines life takes place in contexts so moving to different kinds of contexts
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and looking at how those multiple contexts inform each other opened up for me a world that had movement in it okay this is an important piece of what I want to share with you today
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we started off talking about stuckness and the opposite of stuckness is movement so bringing that movement back in right looking at what what did your hands do
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five thousand years ago I'm offering you movement Let There Be movement in these ideas trans contextual is this idea that there are multiple
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contacts that are simultaneously informing every moment of every organism every living system families but also individuals societies
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cultures that's good you got that right we got trans contextual okay now you can describe anything trans contextually so this bowl of soup
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this is nutrition right this is history this is culture this is Grandmother's passing down recipes this is family this is economy
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people's selling the the goods to make the soup right to go to the soup shop this is agriculture this is science this is technology
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this is art [Music] this is medicine it's just a bowl of soup Okay so one of the things I would like to uh invite you to do when you leave here
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today is just to notice that whenever you are telling us a story from your personal life
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a story that is of you whenever you're telling a story that story is completely trans contextual it's
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holding all these contacts that we live within that story holds your complexity and the complexity you live within isn't it fascinating
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that when I tell you the story of the moment my daughter was born it's all there that's a cultural story that's an economics story what am I going to promise my child that's an education
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story that's a family story that's a history story that's a technological story all of these contexts are in that story and yet somehow when it comes to making
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description we get in the idea that we have to separate these things however we live in an ongoing swirling integration of them that's where we live
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but when we go to talk about or research or try to create actions we very often separate them and in that separation [Music]
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there is what we call reductionism and reductionism can be good okay I would not be here if it weren't for reductionism neither would any of you it's how we build things it's how we learn things
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but for so long we've pulled things out of context to study them and not put them back so we have an idea of information that is constantly decontextualized
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what happens if you put it back when you put things back in their contextual processes they're not still they're not alone they're changing they
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shift from perspective to perspective if you ask my kids who I am they'll tell you one thing if you ask my mother or my high school friends or CERN you'll hear different versions
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so who am I where's the edge of me and I I'd like for you to before we start to think about how we can take these ideas and these practices and
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Implement them in schools and on children and in our lives think about them in terms of yourself who are you what does it feel like
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when someone makes an assessment of you that is inadequate it hurts and you want to fight that's not who I am
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I'm more than that I'm this other thing but sometimes we do it to ourselves and someone says who are you and you say oh well you know my name's Nora and I'm
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a author from California what it's not a lie but it's not who I am and when you ask a child what do you want to be when you grow up that's an interesting thing because
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somehow no matter how little they are they've already worked out that to be who you are is to say what your job will be somehow they already know that it's not
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like anyone told them that explicitly this is implicit information they don't they say I want to be an influencer I want to be a rock star or I want to be a nurse or I want to be a you
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know a president they don't say I want to be an idea or a flower so there's a lot of information that is held in this implicit meta communication world
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if you were born 5 000 years ago there would be different information there it's not how it is trans contextual so you feel good about that word right okay
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so in this image there's this painting and in this painting there are these blotches of paint right
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now you as a living organism what you are doing is you are combining those blotches of paint in your perception
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okay so somehow that pink blotch and that blue blotch and her black hair and the the shape of her nose and the red blotch that is her mouth becomes
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a woman becomes a woman with a little bit of humor and melancholy becomes there's a whole lot of things that you are combining in that process to perceive that
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and you will combine it differently than I will now this this artist ursus where really did this cool project called tidying up art and he took these famous art pieces and
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he fixed them up for us so that we could understand them [Music] and he said well that's cool but whatever that's a big mess it's not
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clear how to understand that so let's take all the black strokes and put them here we'll take all the red Strokes all the yellow all the pink all the Blues
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now I'd like to just invite you to see how much description we're actually doing that is resembling this what are the grades of this child how is their academic life what's the family
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life like what's the economic life what's their technological Behavior look like what is their legal standing and that these different contexts
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you can label all the different contexts and think yeah now we're doing trans contextual description there's all the contexts but you're not because where's the child where's the person
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who can see the person who can see the child the legal system can only perceive in terms of what's legal or not legal the the counselor can only really
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perceive in terms of what's diagnosable and what's not diagnosable what's the behavior can really only discuss the child in terms of classroom behavior and grades who saw the child
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[Music] so I want to invite us back into looking at information of especially of children of people of families of living systems as being this
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process of combining it's the process of combining that's creating the information that stuff is great but it doesn't give you that
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it doesn't give you the the living learning moving changing there's no wonder we're stuck we've got information that isn't moving so
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we live in an interesting time and some people refer to the multiple contextual crises of this era as a poly
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crisis some people refer to it as a meta crisis I prefer poly crisis but we won't get into that discussion today and this is what happens when
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for a century and a half we have decontextualized our perception of the world and education is separated from politics
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is separated from economics is separated from family is separated from ecology or the environment and now we have crises
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looming and we have environmental crises we have got crises in the education system we've got crisis in the health systems
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right we've got situations where the corporations that are making the medicines are actually not trustworthy looking at what's happening happened with the opioid crisis and the right
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somehow Health became big business um we've got crises brewing in technology as AI comes roaring in and it's seemingly Unstoppable we've got energy crises that are
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attached to economic and political crises we've got all of these different crises that are coming in and the first thing we want to do is actually do what I just did and separate
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them I'm going to label them like those I'll I'll do them in the color tones right we've got an ecological crisis an economy crisis a culture crisis a political crisis
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education crisis Health crisis and this is what happens when we don't tend to the whole um
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things break the responses that get made get made to one part at a time and then those responses create more problems right so if you say okay we have to
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address the climate change problem so clearly we have to stop producing carbon okay but um that sends the economy into complete failure and if you send the economy into failure
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then you're going to not have health systems and people aren't going to support themselves and then you're going to have food Christ right so you can't just stop the carbon and if you think okay well what we have is an economic crisis and the wealth Gap
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is getting too big so what we have to do is stop poverty whatever that means but you if you if you just decide to put all the money back into a Level Playing Field it just all shoots back up again to the top
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and creates more consumption so every time we try to pick at one piece of this polycrisis we end up actually creating problems in other contexts
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is my point you see so very often you might say for example you know that there are kids that are not getting the nutrition that they need and part of the behavior issues that you're seeing in classrooms has to do with a lack of
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nutrition or um especially you know reactions to various forms of gluten and or pesticides are increasingly coming in as being associated with behavioral and
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social issues so does that mean that agriculture is responsible for education [Music] where the people in agriculture are
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thinking well that's not my problem or people in the UK who are dealing with lots of respiratory issues and the medical system can't pay for the respiratory issues but they have to
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increase the size of Heathrow for the international traffic for the international market so is it heathrow's problem to pay for the lung issues
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so what we see again and again is that there's something that happens in one context but it is no longer associatable to the context that it came from and so the solutioning to fix the
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problem again becomes a decontextualized process that creates what we are now going to play with is double binds
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okay so this is a term that you may be familiar with um but I'm going to spend a little time playing in this pool with you
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because yarn and CERN are going to want to play with it later so I'm going to give you a nice juicy intro into this um first let me bring it together a
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little bit um we started with this idea of trans contextual description and we went from there to looking at the poly crisis
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all right one of the things that's happening right now I think is that though the language of the poly crisis
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is very abstract and Global and it has you know it rings of news media it rings of whatever social media memes of graphs
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it's over there somewhere but meanwhile we have individuals who are in the repercussions of these combined crises and their economy is not going well
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their family is over stressed their home is is is is producing chemicals that are affecting them their food right
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and they say I'm not thriving I'm depressed I'm anxious I can't concentrate and these issues then get placed on the
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individual you are the one who needs to fit in you are not fitting in you are not able to bring into the society what you should be bringing into the society because
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you're somehow inadequate and so the individuals are carrying the load for the poly crisis and in particular the families the
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households are carrying the load right if you have a child that's sick or a partner that's that is injured or you have a bankruptcy or you have a who
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steps in you have to take care of each other the family has to be there so it's the family that's taking the stress for these polycrises that are producing
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all of this trans contextual stress that then we identify as individual pathology and we say we need to fix you
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so that you can get back in that system that's breaking you that's a double bind my friend right there so this is the big double bind so let me
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give you just a little definition of double bind and then I'll give you some examples and then we'll bring it back okay so the definition of a double bind is that you have a a problem a bind
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in one context and you can't actually solve it in that context because it's caught in another context and so you can't solve it in that
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context because it's caught in these other contexts and the the experience which is probably the most important part of a double binder the experience is that you cannot
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succeed you cannot win you cannot come out of a double bind being loved being credible you can't come out okay and you can't talk about it
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so these this is sort of the criteria of a double bind now for a long time double binds were spoken of just only in terms of schizophrenia and in terms of The Human Experience but I just want to say
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for the record that was never how my father wanted that idea to come out um but the world was fascinated with schizophrenia in that moment
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and so that's how the paper came out however he always held that the double bind was an evolutionary principle an evolutionary principle
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so that every organism at some point right every organism is in relationship to all these other organisms and all those organisms are always changing a little bit
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and so one day the moment comes when that organism cannot do what it used to do to survive if it does what it knows how to do it dies
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but it doesn't know how to do anything else it's an evolutionary jump [Music] so you can you know the sort of the
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basic introductory level double bind is that moment when your lover or your partner says to you or maybe you say it to your partner
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you never tell me that you love me and then the partner you're sitting there thinking well if I now say oh yes yes yes I do love
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you then that's pretty insincere because I'm only saying it because you made me but if I don't say it it's because I don't love you
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so how do you respond because you can't really give either of those responses the original double bind um example was the example of the child [Music]
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who growing up in the this era of the 50s when this was coming out um although it's not so different now the mother says to the child
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don't be so needy don't give don't be you know leaning on me and tugging on me and trying to hug me all the time you need to be independent and strong and then in the next breath turns around
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and says don't you love your mother don't you have any affection for your mother okay how about uh critical thinking class in high school you have to be an individual and think
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for yourself and we'd like you to prove how well you can do that by doing well on these standardized tests [Laughter]
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right you need to be independent and speak up be brave keep your mouth shut and sit quietly be polite
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you have to know when to make trouble and when not to make trouble what's the right kind of trouble to make and the wrong kind of trouble to make my son Trevor
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you got to be careful what you teach your kids so in our household when I was growing up and I was telling these guys this last night you know how when you go on road trips and you go looking for things like
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I see something that starts with the letter t and I see something that starts with the letter Z and right I see a pink car a blue one well in our road trips we had I see a double bind
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and and so of course when I had kids I repeated that because there's a strange thing about having children which is that you repeat your beat your what you are so strange um so I taught my kids pretty early
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about double binds and you don't know you know like how how are they how well are they getting it so one day Trevor comes home from school and I think he was in fifth grade
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and he comes bounding in the door after school and he says mom my teacher double binded me today and so I said you know I had to check
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the theory does this kid have it right because he's got to have it right so I said tell me about what happened and he said okay well there's this new kid who's come who's getting bullied
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and the the teachers have worked out that Trevor being a you know friendly funny guy um is is going if they could get the kid to be friends with Trevor that the other boys would accept him and it would stop
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the bullying so they decide that they're going to put Trevor and this little kid together and this so they did and Traverse not stupid he understood exactly what was
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going on and so he's in class and he's talking to the kid and he's trying to bring him in and whoever gets in trouble for talking in class
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and Trevor's like oh my gosh what am I going to do now because if I was talking to the kid's gonna get beaten up in the hall but if I keep talking to him then I'm
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going to get in trouble and that's going to also reflect badly on the kid and I'm right so what am I supposed to do now with hindsight honestly as a parent I can't say that I feel so good about
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what those teachers did because had Trevor not been Trevor the burden of knowing that that child's bullying was his responsibility was a bit much
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for an 11 year old right that was a bit much but Trevor being Trevor was like ho ho this is a double bind my mom is going to
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be so proud so so Trevor knew that he couldn't say this is the double bind um to his teacher so he
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he he he was right he was double-minded so I asked him what did you do Trevor and he said obviously I double binded him back
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like I said be careful what you teach your children what he did he did was he raised his hand in class and he asked the teacher are you sure and then the double bind went to the
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teacher because if the teacher was sure then it was the teacher's responsibility that the that the kid would get beaten up in the hall I think what happened at that point is that they broke into groups and had little you know
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little other sessions okay so those are a couple of versions of double bind so far we've been holding them in ways that are pretty light okay but I don't want you for one second to think that
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the double bind is something light it is however maybe one of the most important patternings of relationship to become familiar with and little kids can become familiar with it I hope you're
00:43:41
hearing that um to be able to recognize when you're in a double bind doesn't get you out of it but it keeps it from tearing you in half right so so Trevor's ability to to uh to
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to to to notice oh this is a double bind is what saved him from the pain now one of the problems of the double
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bind is that you are often so caught in the extreme drama of the situation that it becomes very difficult to see beyond it
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right it's a problem as I said that's generated in more than one context and in this context if I don't go to work I can't pay the rent I can't feed my children
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if I do go to work I'm away from my children and I can't be with them as they're growing up and I'm unable to give care to myself and the people around me who need that care
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that's a that's a painful situation I have a friend who recently used this expression he said I've taken a leave of absence to take care of my mother as she's dying
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I want you to just listen to that sentence we live in a world in which in order to give the care that is needed you have to get out of the system of our way of making a
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living so the way you make a living is in some sort of contradiction to the way you create life the care that is needed to tend to the
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soil to tend to the elderly to tend to the sick to tend to the children to tend to the injured to tend to each other end to the meals to tend to your health to tend to your children's health
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that in order to do that you have to step out of the way that we consider successful
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life making we have a double bind um addiction okay so people who are dealing with addiction um or habits of either substance or behavior
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one of the things that happens is that they cannot imagine life without the habit all right so that's why I started by saying imagine your hand ten thousand
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years ago all right we have been so habituated into our systems and inter-systemic processes that it's we think this is how it is and to it's for me to say we have
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to change our systemic process I mean I might just as well be saying to you you need to grow gills so you can live underwater next month right it's it's that far away so the double bind
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like my I said before the double bind is is a situation where you get a trans contextual problem and we we have them everywhere
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we have them every day we have them politically we have them in our education system we have them in our homes we have them with our parents we have them with our children we have them with ourselves
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how do you begin to deal with this because remember when I started I said this was never meant to be about pathology this is about evolution evolution is about learning
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one time my stepson Arvid um as he's a Swedish boy and and I were on our way to Barcelona I
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was going down to give a talk and I said do you want to come with me and we'll go on a trip to Barcelona and he brought his brother and we went and and um Arvid was super excited I think he
00:48:37
was nine to have a trip to Spain but we got there and after we'd been in Barcelona for a few hours he suddenly started to cry
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and he started to cry because he was really hungry but he didn't like to eat things that he didn't like to eat you may have known a child or two that
00:49:03
does this one so he knew exactly what he wanted to eat but the food he wanted to eat was in the refrigerator back in Sweden and there was no way to get that and he
00:49:16
thought that he was going to either not be able to eat or have to eat something that he didn't want to eat and so he wouldn't eat and that either way he couldn't win and
00:49:31
that I would be mad at him for coming to Barcelona and not eating and so I realized that we weren't going to go to McDonald's which was of course
00:49:46
what he was angling for in the subtext because that's the same everywhere sort of and I said okay look
00:49:59
let's go out to eat and I'd like for you to think about this restaurant not as where you're going to have food but where you're going to have an adventure I want you to order the weirdest
00:50:11
craziest thing on the menu because you're in Barcelona find out what it is so he ordered this enormous paella that came with you know flames and you know
00:50:24
this whole thing happening and I said eat what you want to eat I love you if you don't eat any of it I love you I just want you to order something and experience it and I don't care if if you eat it or not
00:50:38
I love you either way so that was the opposite okay he couldn't not win he could only win he could only be loved
00:50:53
and so we ordered it he ate some stuff we ate some stuff we shared it we took some back to our hotel we never ate it once we took it back to the hotel but we took it you know when Americans do that in particular we we have this affection
00:51:06
for doggy bags like it's actually going to happen but it doesn't actually happen so we threw it out later but nevertheless he did eat some things and he had the experience and more than
00:51:18
anything we broke that feeling of him not being able to succeed so he could then move in another way and
00:51:29
it changed our relationship in lots of ways so to think that this is a story about food would be a mistake right because actually what it was it
00:51:43
was about what is possible to communicate possible to communicate um having been perfectly trained to live in a world that is based on Industrial metaphors
00:52:01
when we reach a problem the first thing that you might think is let's identify this problem and figure out how to fix the problem
00:52:13
and then you might look at it and you might say ah yeah but I'm studying systemic stuff I'm getting cool here what I know is that this problem isn't just in the problem it's not in the parts fixing the parts isn't going to do
00:52:27
anything we got to fix the relationships right and then you look at those relationships for a while and you say what's in those relationships so often you see people draw out
00:52:43
relational diagrams and what do the relationships look like lines here's mother father line do you have any relationships in your
00:52:55
life that look like lines I don't have any that look like lines ah so maybe what's in the relationship is communication
00:53:09
maybe because the relationships are made of a communication so let's change the communication and then you start to get methodologies for how communication should look this is the script of how you should
00:53:21
talk this is what language should sound like and then you realize yeah well everybody's saying the right things but they still mean the things they used to
00:53:34
mean so changing the script didn't do anything because the communication wasn't in the communication the communication is somewhere else
00:53:49
the communication is in some invisible boundary that says what it's possible to communicate what is it possible to communicate
00:54:02
when you are with your aging parents what's it possible to communicate when you're at the border and you're talking to the police there what's it possible to communicate when
00:54:17
you're 16 years old and you're in an algebra class who is it possible for you to be when you're with your very best friend going out on a Friday night who is it possible for you to be
00:54:29
what's it possible what it's possible to communicate is what is communicated not what is communicated what's on the transcript is not what happened
00:54:47
what's on the transcript is what it was possible to communicate if you are a child growing up in a household where there's abuse what's it possible to communicate if somebody at
00:55:00
school starts asking you questions about what's happening at home what's it possible to communicate if somebody asks you why if you're 12 years old and you are misbehaving in
00:55:15
class why won't you behave what's it possible to communicate so what I'm interested in is this
00:55:28
how do we actually work with that invisible boundary of what's possible to communicate what's in the Ecology of communication that in this room I'm saying these
00:55:43
things and they're Landing in you but that doesn't mean I'm saying what I'm saying it means that the way that it's Landing in you and taking shape and finding form and moving as a Crooked Tree is different than every single person
00:55:58
here what am I bringing to the Ecology of communication what can grow here now what can the next person say how where do they start
00:56:11
what have I made possible to communicate all right now that question makes me look at the context so I could say I have freedom of speech I can say what I want yeah you can
00:56:27
but it's Landing in a context [Music] I mean you could wake up in the morning and have little children and have been up to late the night before having a few glasses of wine with
00:56:44
an old friend and your child could want breakfast at 6 30 a.m you know that happens I have six kids I know and you might look over and think oh my God why
00:56:56
[Music] but you would never say that to your kid because you would spend the next several decades dealing with the pain of that sentence
00:57:12
right you could think it but you wouldn't say it and you would think it for five seconds and go on and think something else because we know we love our children but in that moment at six o'clock in the morning you might wonder
00:57:23
was this such a good idea but you don't say it because it would shift forever what it would be possible to communicate in that family it would change the Ecology of
00:57:39
communication in ways that you don't want to live in you don't want them to live in to deal with a double bind and this is a
00:57:53
a a little bit of a meme I'm not much for memes but I'm going to give you this as a meme because it's so I find it useful um
00:58:05
meet the double bind don't match it meet the double bind don't match it okay if you're going to match it what you're going to do is you're going to
00:58:18
try to address the problem as it looks to meet it is to come into the into the context to come from another context and respond so when I was with Arvid
00:58:33
in Barcelona I didn't try to tell him just eat a little bit or I didn't do any of that stuff I said it's an adventure you're in Barcelona order something weird
00:58:45
we went to a different context the the context of going to the restaurant was not about the food it was about the adventure engage in the adventure and the other double bind starts to loosen
00:59:00
okay so this is because it's a trans contextual problem the only way to actually move with double binds is to move with trans contextual movement movement right we started with movement
00:59:19
problem is this looks if you come from another context the response that you make looks nothing like the problem so it doesn't measure it doesn't match
00:59:41
I'll show you what I mean are you familiar with this image this is the image of the sustainable development goals and um I'd like to ask you just to look at
00:59:53
the image for a second and and see what it says about our culture what kind of a culture likes that kind of communication what's
01:00:07
it possible to communicate possible to communicate okay so we live in a culture that likes boxes that likes separation that likes things
01:00:20
to be identified as separate from other things and so our solutioning process is attached to each of these boxes and we have huge committees billions
01:00:35
of euros toward each of these problems and they're solving in a linear separated way I think increasingly people are you know grouping together two or three of
01:00:46
them my father once said the major problems in the world are the difference between how nature works and how people think
01:01:05
now I'd like you to invite you to look at this picture and I invite you to notice that every single one of these 17 development goals
01:01:21
is present in that image in order to have sustainable life we as mammals must be able to feed our children that's what mammals do to continue
01:01:35
continuing requires being able to feed the babies all right to feed the babies we're going to need for the people who are making the food to be able to feed the babies and for them people who make the clothes
01:01:48
to be able to feed their babies and for their babies to be able to feed their babies and that's going to mean that they're going to need to be healthy they have to be healthy mothers to do that they're going to need to have access to education and we have to honor the
01:02:01
mothers and the all the genders that are possible in making the family that can feed the babies and we've got to be able to have energy to feed the babies and we've got to have be able to take care of each other and
01:02:13
we have to have clean soil and clean oceans and clean air to grow food to feed the babies to be able to feed the babies there it is that's the whole program
01:02:26
right there do you see it in this image if this is what we are looking for is the possibility
01:02:42
of families parents being able to take care of their children being able to feed them good food being able to take care of themselves so that the way that they can take and take care of each other
01:02:57
for them to be in community with the people around them for them to have contact to their land to their seasons to their histories what makes a good school
01:03:14
what do we actually need to teach the children for the future that they're going into what does it mean to succeed in a world that's changing now
01:03:29
so rapidly how do we as parents do this with our kids we as counselors we as teachers how do we
01:03:46
meet not match right so this is an image that meets all of this these images are going to go for
01:04:00
decontextualized singular responses that are going to create more double binds if you try to solve for life on land you're going to end up with life on
01:04:12
water being a disaster life in water or life in the air or life right if you try to solve for one you get into these contradictions and double binds
01:04:26
so somehow this is that zoom in and zoom out in the particulars in the families in the households is this care is the possibility of care
01:04:39
like my friend who had to take the leave of absence to take care of his aging mother how are we holding that care supporting that care
01:04:55
is that interesting approach because it's so different it's unrecognizable if you go to the UN and you show that picture and you say this is the project of the future
01:05:07
they're going to say well how do we measure it what are the categories but this makes sense so it's it this is that this is the you
01:05:21
know hello this is the problem is that the work that needs to get done looks and feels so different then the system that's expecting the strategy the solution and the process
01:05:38
this has been true in my father's work it was true in his father's work I'm third generation standing here 150 years later saying pretty much exactly what my father my grandfather William said in
01:05:50
1905 to the eugenicists said you can't control nature you can't predetermine the outcome do the science and you will see that life
01:06:03
moves in the way that life moves treasure your exceptions treasure your exceptions treasure the kids that don't fit in they're showing us
01:06:17
new ways of living where our systems are in contradiction they're showing us the ways in which the poly crisis is manifesting through us as individuals and Families
01:06:29
they're the canaries in the coal mine do you have that metaphor I'm going to read you a poem from my new book so I put the words up there but you're not allowed to read ahead
01:06:47
just so that you can request sometimes when you have poetry it's nice if it's in another language to read together okay so this is a poem that I wrote
01:06:59
for my kids obviously it's called Mama now your eyes will see the derailing of assumptions your hands will hold the crumble of the
01:07:15
old Matrix I do not have any authority to lean into I have empty Pockets where parents used to advise their children I do not have
01:07:26
any Maps myths or mother wisdom for you I can fix your breakfast but not the culture and when you ask about how to be a good
01:07:38
person I cannot lie to you Everything You Touch in a day is in some ways bloodied you have been born into an edgeless
01:07:51
violence but I will not judge or measure you against a bygone metric I'm here too ready to learn with you Unsure how to be
01:08:10
or who to be I can only see fragments of your worry as the future is a horizon of confusion I cannot protect you
01:08:23
and yet it is my only job aching as I witness from this side of The Hourglass other generations of parents knew the outlines
01:08:35
School career family and retirement but your life will be another shape entirely forming in the fractures
01:08:48
when you say you need a goal I offer you an expired ticket superficial memes roll off the tongue right into your detector
01:09:02
success in the existing system is not going to do you much good your integrity is your rage and I will nourish it
01:09:15
your dignity is your curiosity and I am tiny beside it your courage is your pain and I will sing to it with you
01:09:30
we will Riot together we will notice the Nuance of small Graces in the day we will wash the grit of loss for each
01:09:43
other I am your mama and your future is the story of a storm I am your cabin
01:09:54
your boots your rucksack [Music] was it possible to communicate how do we be in mutual learning with the next Generations
01:10:25
recognizing that we also have come from a history that has been separated that has been industrialized that has been measured that has been optimized that has been made efficient that is
01:10:39
caught in double binds from every direction but we're the adults in the room how do we learn with them what we don't already know how do you teach the Next Generation
01:10:55
something you don't know where is the movement of authority there when I was a little girl people would ask me you know my dad was
01:11:11
two meters and he had a lot of Gravitas and people would ask me didn't you feel insignificant next to him didn't you feel
01:11:25
like so small and it's interesting because I never felt that and I never felt that because he went out of his way
01:11:40
to show me when he was learning he would say in a day he would verbalize it he would say Ah that's an interesting idea and he would look at the fish tank and
01:11:52
he would say you know I used to think this but now I see this or I was wrong about this thing and he showed me his learning and when he showed me he was learning
01:12:07
sometimes from me sometimes from whatever three things happened one I got to learn what he was learning with him right two I learned what it looked like to
01:12:21
learn and to be 70 years old and still learning the third one is the most important thing what I learned is that I learned you
01:12:34
could be in relationships in which there was Mutual learning that's the one because if you're in a relationship in which there is mutual learning
01:12:46
anything is possible you can meet any disaster together you can meet any chaos any crisis if what's happening in the relationship makes it possible to learn together
01:13:01
who can I be when I'm with you I don't know yet I'm learning who can you be when you're with me you don't know yet you're learning what's it possible to communicate
01:13:20
how does that possibility become so so well there's a lot of discussion of of you know making Community but how can we make Community
01:13:32
if we don't first have communing and that's not a noun that's a verb right it's not communication it's communing it's ongoing and learning
01:13:49
I'm going to stop there and open it up for questions [Music] am I right [Music] [Music]
01:14:09
thank you so much if I should summarize all this in just one word it would be wow now it's time for questions and remarks
01:14:21
comments and so this is not really a question it's more a comment Nora it's such a pleasure to hear you talk and it was very moving and
01:14:32
and we just discussed over here how How Deeply touching it is the the way you approach this the the world and your children and your work and we're very
01:14:45
moved by your poem too so thank you very much pleasure to be here it gives me a lot of hope to see all these faces here interested in these questions
01:14:59
thank you for talking about double bind I met double bind last night but I didn't know I I was not aware of it um in the bus on my way home I was
01:15:15
thinking oh this is painful and a lot of other thoughts and then when I came home then I told my husband I think I've learned something today
01:15:29
so my question is um do I is it easier for me to recognize double bind when I feel a pain yeah sometimes the pain is going to be it's going to
01:15:48
show you or the the frustration or the the feeling of being caught attract I can't fix this it's not a dilemma okay in a dilemma you could be wrong
01:16:00
but in a double bind you could lose credibility you could lose relationship right um and losing relationship is losing life
01:16:15
not maybe your whole living body but losing connection to life yeah and being able to recognize a double bind is wonderful it's a really good thing to know how to do
01:16:29
um like I said it won't solve it for you but it will keep it from tearing you in half and that's something yeah so generally you have to do a jump
01:16:40
or come from another context the response to double bind is never on either side of the bind like never which is so hard in a culture that is
01:16:54
completely committed to linear strategic change making and solving if the if the solution looks nothing like the problem
01:17:06
it's incoherent but it's much more uh alive yeah we had a talk last evening
01:17:18
thank you for being together with us yesterday we had I told you about a completely new case I was starting
01:17:31
about in the 11 years old boy who was told to be the least mentalizing boy they've ever had in that arrangement
01:17:47
and I met with him and his mother and after 10 minutes he said oh this is boring and uh
01:17:59
I ah that was a difficult moment and I found a way but uh what is what I talked about yesterday evening that he was so
01:18:12
good at mentalizing me because what I was doing was [Laughter] I tried to get in contact with I was
01:18:25
maybe nervous how it was difficult situation for me and he saw it and he helped me by saying this is boring could we talk about something else the last
01:18:39
part he didn't say that was my my task but we talked about it and you had some very important Reflections so that's why I bring it up again so that people also
01:18:55
can go into this kind of talk about mentalization it's a very strong word in these years I think that the this boy is
01:19:12
um receiving information in ways that other people might be receiving it much less receiving signals from the existing
01:19:26
system that other people might see but but be able to get Beyond he's perceiving things and he's not going to back down
01:19:38
so the the uh incredible honor of being able to actually find out what he's seeing um you know my dad worked with a lot of
01:19:51
different fields he worked in other cultures he worked with other kinds of organisms porpoises and octopuses he worked with people who
01:20:03
were dealing with addictions and severe um people he used to say people who had been identified as schizophrenics do you see the interesting language there um
01:20:16
he liked to talk to kids in every one of those cases what he's getting is a peak outside of the is-ness the patterns of of communication and and
01:20:32
and society that we've become so accustomed to that we don't question anymore and we can't see it anymore so if you look from other cultures if you look from other other organisms if you look through the perceptions of
01:20:46
other people who aren't seeing it the way you're seeing it you have a tiny opportunity to rip a little hole you know did you ever see that movie The
01:20:59
Truman Show it's like you can rip a little hole and Screen you're in and peek out and see life from another Direction um but it doesn't come along very often
01:21:13
so that's one thing that I would say is that it's an incredible opportunity to hear from him what he sees what really struck with me was what you talked about with the Ecology of
01:21:25
communication and the possibility of what we can communicate and me and my colleague were just talking about um the fact that we were always really curious as to how can we how can we
01:21:37
implement this in practice so I think that's some of the questions that are raised with us and in the risk of trying to have you deconstruct what you were saying I was just curious if you could
01:21:52
point to where do you see this mind shift where do you see that needed to be implemented in order for us to have this kind of paradigm shift
01:22:04
in the way we see children in the way we work with children the way we educate children and the way we educate ourselves as adults working for in children so
01:22:16
I guess the first thing I want to say is that the question to start with needs to be an ecological question
01:22:30
all right so that's why I offered you that um that question of who can you be when you're with me who can I be when you're when I'm with
01:22:42
you because that is an ecology all right we have a whole lot of understanding of behavior and communication that's based on the self what did I say what did you say who are
01:22:55
you you should develop you and I should develop me this is inherently unecological we are creating each other
01:23:06
we are teaching each other how to be in the world we are shaping each other so the first question is how are you making it possible for people to be in
01:23:18
relationship with you if you start asking that question and start perceiving in that way it's a shift that will shift the communication you don't then have to shift the
01:23:31
communication the perception shifts it the question itself shifts it so it's but that's how ecologies work which is really different than we have
01:23:43
to open up the hood and fix the parts of the car right so I think even if you just take what I said today to to your own self
01:23:56
in your own families in your own household in your own friend group and pay attention who how am I allowing this person to be in relationship with me who can they be
01:24:10
am I are they are they funny when they're with me are they serious do I bring out thoughtfulness in them are they angry when they're with me like
01:24:21
who are they and who am I when I'm with them am I am I funny am I curious am I closed down am I careful and there's not one thing that's better than
01:24:33
another you you need to have lots of different relationships that have lots of different shapes and forms but pay attention yeah oh there's so many questions I would
01:24:47
like to ask you if you could imagine a health system a school system without a missionary children that would be nice to hear something about you have you said in your presentation that stuckness occur when information is
01:25:00
not moving you have given us so much information that has moved all of us thank you very much [Music] thank you [Music]
01:25:21
nor every time you're here we give you a little gift we can't do that today too we were just about to give you the same gift as last time but then we changed it so we do have a gift for you here it's
01:25:33
very nicely wrapped you can unwrap it now that's anthropological curiosity oh oh that's beautiful look at that I'm glad you like it
End of transcript