The Im(possible) Vows
What I learned about promises while writing my wedding vows and curating a book about chaos and possibility during a planetary emergency.
A few weeks before my wedding, I found myself in a strange position: writing vows while simultaneously creating a book about embracing relentless uncertainty. The irony was not lost on me.
I became deeply engaged in conversations with contributors for Imagine—Embracing Chaos and Possibility in a Planetary Emergency, a book of artifacts and conversations that explore how we might navigate these times. These weren't just any conversations. We were speaking with Nora Bateson, a pioneer thinker, educator, and systems theorist whose work asks how we can improve our understanding of complexity so we can better interact with the world. Her father, Gregory Bateson, changed how many of us think about the patterns that connect all living systems. Nora has taken this further, coining the term "Warm Data" to describe the rich, relational information we need to understand complex challenges.
Then there was Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Dean of Education at the University of Victoria and author of Hospicing Modernity, an invitation to re-examine our relationship with the toxicity of modernity and a guide for how to cope with the dangers of colonialism and capitalism. She's also a founding member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective.
Here I was, collecting wisdom from brilliant minds about impermanence and systems change, while trying to write promises of ‘forever’.
"What can you be when you're with me?" and other questions that changed everything.
Natalie Seisser, a dear friend and the book’s lead editor, and I sat virtually with Nora discussing her insight that the words "'my” and “imagination” are a set of words that should never be together. That creativity doesn't live in isolated individuals but emerges from what she calls "fluctuating interdependencies”. The spaces between us. She posed the question that became the central theme of the conversation: "What can you be when you're with me?"
It's an ecological question, she explained, not a transactional one. Not "how will you make me happy" or "what will you do for me," but what intelligence emerges when we create conditions for something larger than ourselves?
I couldn't help myself. I opened up about my vow-writing struggle. How do you promise "forever" when you know that everything changes? And I’m not just referencing our unprecedented times of Poly/Meta crises.
Nora laughed - not unkindly. She mentioned that her own vows were published in her book Combining. She understood the paradox completely.
Learning to Swim When the Water Rises
The conversations with Vanessa added another layer of beautiful complexity to this ironic moment of promises and hope for the future. She described an exercise called the Three Hope Jars that has become central to her work with groups facing climate and social breakdown. People distribute beans among three jars representing different types of hope: hope that our current systems can continue sustainably, hope that we can consensually replace them with something better, or hope in what she calls "composting harm"—acknowledging we're past tipping points and must learn from the consequences of our choices.
"More and more we're seeing that people are putting more beans in the last jar," she told me, "because something inside them already acknowledges that."
Vanessa was describing a visceral recognition that many of us carry but rarely name—that the systems promising certainty, predictability, and permanence are in decline. We live in what she calls "VUCA on steroids"—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in a context where the old frameworks no longer produce the same results.
But here's what struck me most: instead of treating this recognition as cause for despair, Vanessa frames it as an invitation to develop different capacities. She talks about learning to "hold space for the good, the bad, the ugly, the broken, the messy, and the messed up of humanity within ourselves and around us without throwing up, throwing a tantrum, or throwing in the towel."
That line was so good, I almost wove it right into my vows.
How not to “throw up, throw a tantrum, or throw in the towel”
It requires what Vanessa calls a fundamental shift from "narrow boundary intelligence", focused on goal optimization and control, to "wide boundary intelligence," where you can navigate complexity and emergence without falling apart. It's learning to find stability in movement rather than demanding stillness.
”In Brazil, we have a saying, which says that in a situation of a flood, it’s only when the water reaches your bum that you can actually swim. Before that, when the water is at your ankle or at your knees, you can only walk or wade. So for people whose waters are at their ankles and at their knees, there is more resistance, for sure. But when the water is at your bum and you see that the paradigms that worked before are no longer working, are no longer producing the same results, then we generally say that people are in the pit. Then you either drown or you learn to swim. And what we found is that people who are in that pit, and we have more and more people getting to the stage of the pit, then they are interested in what else there is.”
The metaphor landed hard.
I think of moments as a child walking in a pool, slightly fearful of the deep end. I would start at the shallow end, walking through water. As I inched towards the deep end of the pool, craning my neck to keep my face above water, I ended up on my tippy toes. Eventually, I would be submerged entirely if I didn’t lift my legs up and start swimming.
If you’re still wading through the water (if the broken systems are still working for you), you won’t see the need to swim (to let go, be willing to see the fractured relationships for what they are, and the need for healing). But regardless, the water levels are rising.
What I Learned About Promises
The more I talked with these contributors, the more I understood why I'm drawn to this work in the first place. I see it everywhere - teams and organizations desperately trying to solve for the polycrisis, making promises all the time. KPIs that guarantee carbon neutrality by 2030. ESG roadmaps that plot linear progress toward sustainability. Grant proposals promising specific impact results to funders who demand measurable outcomes. But we can't solve for something so volatile, in times so volatile, with the same thinking that kept us believing it wouldn't be volatile.
Just as the romantic belief that two separate individuals could promise to remain unchanged, that love could freeze time, that "forever" was something we could engineer. Just as companies believe they can engineer their way to sustainability while maintaining the same growth-based models that created the crisis.
Nora's work, Vanessa’s work, and so many others in this book showed me that even our individual identities are illusions. We exist in relationship, in the patterns between us. Organizations, too, exist in webs of interdependency that they rarely acknowledge. And Vanessa's insights about learning to "holding space for the good, the bad, the ugly, the broken, the messy, and the messed up (…) without throwing up, throwing a tantrum, or throwing in the towel" felt more honest than any corporate promise to optimize our way out of complexity, or any promise to love the same person forever. Because we won't be the same people. That's the point.
The Vows I Finally Wrote vs. The Vows I Finally Spoke
Let’s just say, they weren't the vows I expected to write when I started this book project five years ago. But they were the vows that emerged messily on paper.
The vows that I finally spoke? Those were almost completely ad libbed as it was an insanely muggy 35 degrees celsius that day in Ho Chi Minh City by the river, I could hardly read my paper through the stinging beads of sweat in my eyeballs, and just when I thought I could focus on my sentence, a large cargo boat rang its blaring horn as it passed us and I lost my train of thought!
Maybe the most honest promise we can make is simply to show up to whatever emerges, cargo boats, sweat and all.
With kindness and curiosity,
Laura