Literal Portals #1

Symmathesy (noun): (Pronounced: sym-math-a-see)

In the summer of 2020, I left university with a Master’s degree in Creativity & Innovation from the Edward de Bono Institute for the Development of Thinking. Full of hope, I entered the impact business and do-goodism world. I did what I was told: attended courses, built my network, created content, and ticked off all the usual suspects. One of my first ongoing content creation efforts was writing a Sustainability Jargon Buster. The world of sustainability-as-usual was, and still is, a minefield of acronyms, reporting standards, frameworks and “must know” methods. The list of widespread and not/misunderstood acronyms and definitions continues to grow steadily to this day. I gave up jargon-busting a long time ago when an icky feeling started to overtake my effort. I increasingly felt like trying to understand sustainability through a business lens was holding me hostage.

Photo by Oscar Keys on Unsplash

Hostages of language

What if, by expecting this level of rapidly evolving knowledge from sustainability professionals, we are missing the point that language is holding us hostage in business as usual? Sustainability-as-usual keeps us so busy that we miss the opportunity to pause, stop, reflect and wonder.

• How is our shared language influencing our ideas and beliefs?

• What does the dominant language of our industry reflect? Industrialism? Capitalism? Egocentrism? Care? Love for life?

• Whose voices shape the language of your organization, community, and industry? Whose voices are missing?

• What kind of decisions and values does the language of your organization favor?

• How is language influencing your relationship to yourself, each other, and wider nature?

Slow Dancing with Literal Portals

Through loops, over barriers, accompanied by constant confusion, a steadily growing number of questions and an increased awe for life, everything and nothing changed. I went from busting jargon to a slow, bewildered dance with words that feel like portals into unexplored realms and unimaginable futures. I have always lived with my nose in books, but weirdly enough, I never expected that language would ever mean so much to me. For a long time, I just loved stories and the vivid emotions, rhythms and feel of books. Only recently have I recognized that not only books and stories are portals to other words. Sometimes, a single word is enough. Today, I invite you to the literal portal of the word “Symmathesy”.

Symmathesy

Desperately we need to increase our understanding of the world we live within, of this there is no dispute. But how? when we are caught in a Mobius strip of information, communication, information, communication… and while clutching a culture with a proclivity for quantified, step by step, formulized, ossified, solutions? Those rigidities decrease the visibility of the “symmathesy”.

Symmathesy: A word in progress, Nora Bateson

Greek Prefix Syn/Sym (Together) + Mathesi (to learn:
Symmathesy = Learning Together

““The evolution is in the context.” (George Bateson) So why don’t we have a word for those bodies, families, forests, and other buzzing hives of communication—and for the mutual learning that takes place within those living contexts?

A working definition of symmathesy might look like this:

Symmathesy (noun): (Pronounced: sym-math-a-see)

1. an entity formed over time by contextual mutual learning through interaction. For example, an ecosystem at any scale, like a body, family, or forest is a symmathesy.

2. the process of contextual mutual learning through interaction.'“

Small Arcs of Larger Circles, Nora Bateson

Photo by Mark Thompson on Unsplash

What are we missing?

Symmathesy doesn’t only describe how I feel. It also pinpoints, painfully, what is missing. I am in a constant (un)learning dynamic with my fellow humans. Here, a mutual learning interaction emerges naturally through openness and curiosity. It’s the more-than-human that I feel disconnected from in a learning context. Other beings are constantly offering me learnings, insights and nodes. The question that keeps emerging is: What are we offering them? With our unnatural, disconnected, uprooted, ungrounded and skewed way of living. What kind of mutual learning partners are we to the rest of life on earth? How can we heal our relationships with other beings and deepen symmathesy? A never-ending stream of questions started flowing after my encounter with this one beautiful word ‘Symmathesy”. I plucked a few from the now unstoppable river for you;

• What are the seasons inviting us to?

• What / who is stifling symmathesy? What does this blockage mean for the evolution and continuity of life on Earth?

• What if we learned how to speak whale?

• What is needed for us to start listening to the calls of the earth?

• When we recognize more-than-human beings as teachers and wisdom keepers, we will learn to respect them?

• Who can teach us how to live in harmony?

• What wisdom lies beyond our anthropocentric ego in the more-than-human world?

• In a mutual learning relationship, what do we offer the caterpillar?

Symmathesy, symbiosis, liminality, metanoia, weaving, pattering, discernment, metabolism and aporia are all literal portals to alternative ways of thinking, being and relating. What words opened whole new worlds to you? What if we explored them together?

Further Readings on Symmathesy

Symmathesy: A word in progress
Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns