“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
“Before the change, there is a prelude, a priming, a saturation of mutual learning between organisms through which pathways of possibility are produced.”
Expanding Change and Interdependency
What follows is a two-part series; the first half is a story about expanding change and interdependency, and the second is how to be part of this process of change
Yes, interdependency is commonly defined as characterized by mutual reliance. It is used in the realm of relationships to describe a means to create first-order change that will make an initial difference regarding social/environmental problems. By all accounts, this seems like an excellent framework to create better relationships. Yet we are far from mitigating so many interpersonal difficulties, not to mention environmental and socio-political discord and conflict. How is it that psychotherapy and allopathic medicine, which use interdependency quite often in their goals, for instance, although advanced technology-wise, are still predominantly focused on maintaining the negative effects of poor habitual sustenance, pesticides, and generalized stress? Ivan Illich’s concept of iatrogenesis, self-fulfilling illness, is still a prevalent reality in our society.
These outcomes are ill-conceived, fail to account for our complexity, and are treated as separate entities or as needing a specialist. This forces those labeled as change agents, i.e., teachers, medical personnel, and politicians, to become part of the problems, working in isolation. Rather than being allowed to make a difference that makes a difference (a second-order change) in their actions, they are relegated to not creating ongoing, broader change at the overlap and interface with other contexts. Nature, for instance, doesn’t depend on fragmentation or opposites. It somehow blends the messiness and beauty of its existence. It is a Ying/Yang lab of changes that redefines interdependency.
Maybe the problem is partly a linguistic issue: not using enough verbs to emphasize our observations and understanding of how each action in our life is constantly being interwoven into nature’s complexity, which cannot always be defined. It is like the adage of the harmonious martial art Aikido that I practiced for 35 years: “you can’t hit a moving target,” when your actions randomly create changing patterns that manifest as an expansion of our capacity to blend with the ever-changing forces of our environment.
Trees we now know interdepend (the active verb form of interdependency) upon each other in a form of collective communication to preserve and perpetuate their existence. An estuary intermingles its blending potential to send nourishment upstream and downstream simultaneously, with improvisational, randomly balanced results. These processes motivate the ever-changing patterns to adjust as needed to balance our ecosystem. However, our predominant cultural way of perceiving things tends to rely on linear cause-and-effect reasoning that continually separates everything that exists, without considering how it all interdepends on our survival. Profits, unequal distribution of resources, fragmentation of subjects in educational settings, wars, building a road without saving a complex meadow or other living communities, and so on are forms of accelerated entropy resulting from the runaway consequences of real interdependency being interrupted. Hence, the insidious processes of poverty and disaffectedness become a blockage to the many orders of unending change.
Being Part of the Solution
Okay, enough of the obvious insidious patterns. How can we interdepend upon ourselves to have an expanded sense of change and a better use of our interdependency? We can start by using more insightful wisdom about how life coalesces through systemic or ecological action to override the right-or-wrong binaries that dominate our lives. This entails understanding how the whole of a system is more than the sum of its parts. We owe this to our younger generations by sharing, listening, and learning from each other. Change isn’t a passive action waiting for you to make it happen; it occurs at every moment. When I began my studies of anthropology, I remember a quote from media theorist Neil Postman asking, “What kinds of changes are going on right now? Which are important?” This includes first-order changes, like recognizing a needed difference, and continuing up to an infinite nth-order change if needed to make a difference.
What I learned from being involved with Nora Bateson’s Warm Data Labs is that, as she describes, “ready-ing” is about creating a flexibility alliance for contexts to interface with other contexts through changing interactions. This includes encouraging unseen mutual connection about life’s coalescing toward vitality. This process is stimulated by pausing and allowing hypothetical liminal messages to emerge. This leads to recognizing how we can relearn the possibilities of new contexts that will support ongoing changes in non-directional ways. This is the essence of improvisational and stochastic movement that brings us in touch with the ecology of ideas and our interdependency as it is meant to be.
Prompts to Help you Mutually Learn From Each Other
In small groups or side by side with another, especially in intergenerational settings, using win-win dialogue ( volleying by expressing, paraphrasing, checking), allowing for abductive pauses/gaps (hypothetical out-of-the-box insights being in between the prevalent inductive and deductive ways of reasoning), of everyday actions towards expanding change and understanding interdependency:
In what different ways can you encourage flexibility that allows for change within contexts of work, parenting, and family? Media, religion, and schooling? Include intergenerational dialogue to mutually learn different generational views
How can discussions within a group or with another demonstrate actions of change that tend to the needs of others? Encourage strategies that demonstrate utilize different contexts and needs
Personal Perspectives Essential Reads
When Doggedness Doesn’t Work, Is It Time to Give Up?
Avoidance Can Literally Shrink Your World if You Let It
In what ways can you help unearth hidden messages from your subconscious to share and learn from others that are beyond a limited meaning and can demonstrate out-of-the-box possibilities?
If you allow yourself to focus on pauses and introspection, in what ways can you stimulate conversations that arise from a space between inductive and deductive reasoning? How would this be different from your experiences?
How can you have a give-and-take that allows you to thread information through the different contexts prevalent in your community? In what ways would new interconnections between different institutions create different mutual actions i.e., schools and law enforcement and senior living centers, etc.?
What directions can you explore that change toward an infinity of differences and not a specific goal?
How can a discussion based on mutual learning be open-ended to explore what occurs at the interface of how one context informs another context, and what differences would you expect?
Bateson, N. (2022). An essay on ready-ing: Tending the prelude to change, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 39(5),990–1004. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2896
Bateson, Gregory. “Steps to an Ecology of Mind,” Chandler Publishing Company, 1972
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-wider-lens/202307/the-process-of-change
Warm Data: https://www.warmdata.life/
