The Major Problems of the World Result From...

I just finished watching a short documentary that's been on my list for a little while now. It's called "An Ecology of Mind." It's a look at the work of Gregory Bateson, directed by one of his daughters, and I'll be damned: it's a rare movie about ideas that makes me tear up.

I highly recommend it.

I have a particular fondness for that brilliant madman because he had a huge heart, a huge intellect, and he so often perfectly encapsulated an idea, as he did when he said, "The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."

It's worth knowing that, by his definition, you're a part of nature too.

Very rarely do we work the way we're led to think we work.

Gym class and phys ed teach us so little about what it means to be a body in the world - let alone how to gracefully navigate gravity or safeguard our joints. Psychology classes would have us think that rodent models and statistical averages shed meaningful light on the individual human experience. We don't learn about the principles and problems of communication. We get next to nothing in terms of ecology, the very science of relationships in the natural world.

To complicate matters further we don't know how to think about our thinking.

The phrase itself is enough to give one fits.

But if all the 2020 memes are any indication, our habitual thinking has just about run out of runway.

As an example, something I was considering the other day...

So often we spend our time acting as if we had something to prove or something to lose. We act as if we had some thing within us, rather than some -ing occurring through us. We would do well to look beyond discrete nouns and think instead in terms of relationships (or relatings) and processes (or happenings).

That for me is the profound value of a movement practice. We get a felt sense of how we fit into the world. We come to find a sense of our own internal cohesion. We become better acquainted with -- and begin to change -- the means whereby we perceive the world and define what's possible for us.

And these days a redefinition of the possible is exactly what the doctor ordered.