Infinite Complexity that Energizes

Inspired by Nora Bateson

This article is about becoming energized by the infinite complexity of our world and more meaningfully engaging with the web of relationships that we all find ourselves as a part of.

⚡️ Using Complexity and Uncertainty to Energize Ourselves

One of the most common feelings that I've had when working with complexity and interdependencies is this feeling of apathy and hopeless uncertainty. Yet, what I love about Nora Bateson is that she proposes the exact opposite relationship to uncertainty.

Complexity demands a more engaged inquiry to explore the patterns that connect.

In this sense, to suggest that systems thinking can offer a scientific overtone to a spiritual movement is to miss the more rigorous intellectual pursuit that systems thinking ideas can deliver. It’s a rip-off. In fact, the beauty and awe that can be generated by seeing the world as a nest of millions, billions, and trillions of interdependencies interacting with each other across time and geography is profound. But, it is not a profundity that asks for vacant surrender; instead it beckons for study, for art, for active learning.

The uncertainty is a heroic call into the unknown. A call into the world of changing contexts and new relationships between people, ideas, objects, and the world writ large. In what ways are you existing in relationship to life and how could you explore that individual contextual complexity and share it with the world in the form of art, communication, dialogue, or writing (to name a few.)

🕷 We All Co-Exist in a Inextricable Web of Relationships

A simple greeting, a drunken disclosure, a caffeinated philosophical rant, the tender confessions of lovers, are all portions of nourishment on the banquet table of belonging. Together, as speaker and listener, we are both lost and found in our contact, researching the edges of one another’s lives to reveal a portrait of our own outlines. Where am I in you? Where are we in the eons of history? How do we travel through this emotional and intellectual landscape? Are you kindred?

Which makes me ponder, what is it like to be in relationship with the world, with life, with existence. It seems so unexplainable, I don't even know where to start. What am I even in relationship with in the first place? What is considered an object of relationship and what isn't?

Ideas, dreams, physical objects, people, animals. Every object is it's own individuality and unique context and that's what makes life so profound and irreducible.

☠️ The World is Full of Difficulties

On top of that, when we realize that we are all exist in a web of relationships that co-influence each other we can also recognize that one person's suffering is everyone's suffering and one person's happiness is everyone's happiness.

That being said, there seems to be more than enough suffering to go around these days, and we're all affected by this. It's not just the person suffering that's in pain, it's all of is. Their suffering does a boomerang move and shows up in our lives in ways that we don't understand.

Maybe their suffering so they act immaturely to someone at their job. This person is then affected and will likely act from this hurt and so on and so forth. Then it could go all the way around like a butterfly effect and show up to you in the form of a driver on the road getting mad at you and having road rage, or a homeless man lashing out, or someone you know getting swept up into drug/alcohol addiction. There are numerous ways that hurt shows up in the web of humanity, nevertheless none of us are exempt.

This also means that we're all responsible for our aspect of the web of relationships. The way that we relate to people is everything. The way we talk about people, ideas. Are we quick to put down and demonize or do we seek to understand? Is there caring or hatred?

📕 Conclusion

I want to end this piece off with a few quotes from Nora Bateson herself.

To be a participant in a complex system is to desire to be both lost and found in the interrelationships between people, nature, and ideas.

This means big oil is not to blame, big banks are not to blame, big pharma is not to blame. Big weapons, and bad guys — not to blame. We are all included in a pattern in which those systems are interlocked into our survival and destruction.

To be a student of life is to be willing to be shattered.