What is a Good Life? #98
Embracing Ambiguity with Nora Bateson
On the 98th episode of What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Nora Bateson. Nora is an award-winning filmmaker, research designer, writer, educator, international lecturer, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute based in Sweden. She is the creator of the Warm Data theory and practices. Nora’s work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father Gregory Bateson.
Her first book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity. In her latest second book Combining, Nora invites us into an ecology of communication where nothing stands alone, and every action sets off a chain of incalculable consequences. She challenges conventional fixes for our problems, highlighting the need to tackle issues at multiple levels, understand interdependence, and embrace ambiguity. She was the recipient of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity in 2019.
In this engaging conversation, we delve into the dangers of certainty and the pursuit of fixed answers, exploring how moving beyond polarities can lead to mutual learning and understanding. We discuss the weaponisation of language, the impact of divisive discourse, and how more generative and sacred communication can guide us toward deeper connection and shared presence.
This conversation invites you to engage more fully with life as it is—its beauty and its horror, its creativity and its destruction. It’s a call to hold life’s complexity with openness, to embrace it, and to let it go as the flow of life continues to unfold.
The weekly clip from the podcast (3 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (67 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
There is something wonderfully ironic about how I perceive myself to be seeing life more clearly, and yet that clarity leads to embracing a lot of ambiguity. The idea that more clarity doesn’t eliminate the uncertainty of life, but rather makes space for it, welcomes it into a bigger picture of life.
I remember being indelibly struck when reading about Edward Lorenz’s contribution to Chaos Theory in Chaos by James Gleick.
He ran a weather model on a computer back in the 1960s.
He initially ran the model with 12 inputs or variables that were calculated to four decimal places. When he went to replicate the same test, instead of using the figures in his notebook (to four decimal places), he used the computer printout, which only went to three decimal places.
He discovered that small changes in initial conditions could lead to drastically different outcomes over time. This phenomenon is famously referred to as the butterfly effect—the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could theoretically cause a tornado in Texas.
Now, sometimes when I hear something in a field or area in which I don’t claim to have any expertise, I wonder: Have I oversimplified my understanding of something to the point that I am being borderline naive, or are others not willing to see a simple truth and instead are creating greater complexity to explain what they don’t want to see?
Whatever the case may be, I can’t think of any areas or moments in my life that are only subject to twelve inputs or variables, let alone me knowing the certainty or specific nature of those inputs to three, let alone four, decimal places.
So what chance do I have of making any predictions with any real certainty?
I remember when I took a sabbatical to India; I was at the end of a long train ride, travelling alone, with a rather upset stomach, and I was waiting at a train station for the final leg of my 18-hour trip. It was around 6 a.m. I was listening to a podcast called Freakonomics, where their guest, Philip Tetlock, suggested that expert predictions were often only slightly more accurate than chance, i.e. flipping a coin.
Given the mental and physical state I was in at the time, I am always somewhat surprised that something from that morning nine years ago could have remained with me for so long or that I’d often refer back to it in conversation.
These were the first intellectual invitations for me to acknowledge the complexity and uncertainty that is inherent in life, but I take a lot more from the noticings in my own life or, indeed, the felt experience of it.
I don’t know what mood I will be in at 3 p.m. today. I don’t know what thoughts will be running through my head. I don’t know the same for everyone in my life. I don’t know what the weather will be like. I don’t know, with absolute certainty, whether I will still be alive by then or if someone I care about will be.
Which leads me to the point I want to make, more than anything: When we pretend we do know the answers to life’s unfolding events, ironically, we deaden the experience. We run over the top of life with our stories, stats, averages, and predictions.
The predictions or stories then reduce our capacity to observe and see and feel life for what it is.
This living, pulsing, complex thing of beauty—and at times, horror—that we often fail to experience fully, too afraid to acknowledge our lack of control and the finite nature of our existence, unsure of when our time will come to an end.
Instead of paying attention to the specific moments of our lives, we rely on averages to predict what we might experience, and we end up building lives around these predictions, which neither reflect our feelings nor our true nature.
Then we wonder why this life may seem so underwhelming, while we promise ourselves it is really going to begin, or that we’ll really feel alive, after X milestone is hit.
In my experience, acknowledging and embracing this ambiguity, complexity, and not knowing is the very thing that has breathed so much life back into my life. There can even be harmony and peace with that ambiguity when you can begin to sit with it, dare I say trust it, and realise there is no need to solve it.
In embracing the unknown, we find the freedom to truly live, without the constant pressure of needing everything to fit into neat, predictable patterns. When we align to this nature of life we can sit more comfortably with the chaos.
3. Full Episode - Embracing Ambiguity with Nora Bateson - What is a Good Life? #98
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4. This week’s Questions
Is there an area of your life where you are clinging to certainty where really only ambiguity exists?
Can you reflect on the beauty you might be overlooking while focusing solely on the horror, and vice versa? (as per the clip above)
About Me
I am a coach, podcast host, and writer, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 200 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.
If you would like to work with me to explore your own lines of self-inquiry, take part in my weekly free silent conversations, discuss experiences I create to stimulate greater trust, communication, and connection, amongst your teams, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.
Great to see Nora on the show Mark!