Science Quote by Mary Catherine Bateson

“Fluidity and discontinuity” sounds like a tidy paradox until you remember Bateson’s métier: studying living systems, families, and cultures that refuse to behave like machines. The line is a rebuke to our favorite modern fantasy - that life is a stable narrative with clean causal chains. Bateson, working in the long shadow of cybernetics and anthropology, is pointing at what those fields keep discovering: patterns emerge, then break; identities cohere, then renegotiate; institutions adapt, then lurch.

The specific intent is almost methodological. If you start by assuming continuity, you will misread the world’s most consequential dynamics: migrations, technological shifts, relationship changes, ecological tipping points. “Central” matters here. She’s not saying change happens; she’s saying change is the operating system. Fluidity is the everyday drift - improvisation, learning, adaptation. Discontinuity is the rupture - the divorce, the revolution, the diagnosis, the economic crash. Pairing them prevents a soothing interpretation. You don’t get to romanticize flow as gentle progress; discontinuity is the reminder that transformations often arrive as breaks, not gradients.

The subtext is ethical and practical: stop treating disruption as failure. In Bateson’s work on improvisational lives (especially women’s), discontinuity isn’t an exception to be hidden; it’s a condition to be navigated with intelligence and care. The line works because it refuses nostalgia for linear “life plans” and instead grants legitimacy to lives assembled in fragments, pivots, and revisions - a reality many people inhabit, even when the culture pretends otherwise.