The Learningness of All Life: Three reflections on percolating in Warm Data

By Dave Pendle

The Utter Necessity of Mutual Learning

I have just completed my fourth Warm Data Host training with Nora Bateson, two of which have had the blessing of being in person. The most recent was a People Need People Warm Data host training titled "Warm Data Online Training for Global Educators — What is learning in a changing world?"

What follows are three poetic contemplations combining all of my experiences of
Warm Data: Transcontextual Mutual Learning, in person and online. The first posits that all life is learning; the second explores the utter necessity of approaching Warm Data as a Practice; the third describes the absorbing encounters with ‘Unanswerable Questions’ that are central to the full experience of Warm Data.

I. All Life is Learning

One beautiful aspect of these courses is practicing learning in its multitudinous forms.
The fourth time around, something is becoming impossible to ignore.
Not because it’s new.
But because this recognition continues to expand.
One definition of Warm Data that Nora offers is transcontextual mutual learning.

But that phrase, technical and precise as it is, for me doesn’t quite hold or convey
what’s now coming into view.
It’s not only about Warm Data as a personal or collective practice.
I sense something even more inherent, intrinsic and essential than that;

Warm Data points to the nature of life itself.

Life is learning.
Not only metaphorically.
Not just poetically.
Actually.
Relentlessly.
At every scale.
Everything that is alive is in continuous exchange.
Everything is adjusting, responding, reorganising.
All life is adjusting, responding, reorganising.
Not occasionally.
Constantly.

The more I immerse myself in these labs, the less and less this feels like an idea…
and the more it feels like something I am inside of.

Something that is happening whether I recognise it or not.

The scale of this is difficult to take in.
Because if life is learning…
Then learning is not located.
It is not in schools.
It is not in systems.
It is not even in individuals.
It is everywhere.
Across contexts.
Across questions.
Across relationships.
Across systems.

And this is where it becomes urgent.
Because we are living in a time that is asking for a scale of learning that is
unprecedented.
Call it the meta-crisis. The poly-crisis. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is this:
The conditions we are in cannot be met with existing knowledge.
They cannot be solved from within isolated domains.
They require learning that is alive, relational, and continuous.

Transcontextual Mutual Learning is not optional.
It is not a technique we can adopt or ignore.
it is the condition for being able to respond at all.

And what I’m noticing, over time is, 
That my capacity to perceive this is changing.
Ever-widening.
This isn’t a small shift.
It’s not a refinement.

It’s a reorientation.

And I don’t think I/We have even begun to grasp the implications of it all.

II. The Perpetual Practice of Perception 
Exploring Ecologies of Attention

One notion Nora consistently puts forward throughout the warm data trainings, which deeply accords with my own experience, is that Warm Data/Warm Data Hosting is a practice.

To live fully in a complexifying world, I realise that:

There is no arrival. Only practice.
To be a Warm Data host is not to hold a method. 
It is to remain in practice. Continually.
Not practice as repetition for mastery. Practice as relationship.
In, with, through, and amongst perceptions.
Such practices are easy to recognise, yet challenging to apply.
To notice the living complexity which is already inside.
The body. The environment. Relationships.
Of all existing domains: past, present, future, familial, biological, ecological, spiritual.
No models or maps for perception are required. 
No complex terminology needed.

Life is already hugely complex. The practice is to perceive it,

I notice, over time, something begins to loosen.
The mechanical. The scripted. 
The already-known descriptions of what is happening.
My familiar, accustomed ways of seeing that make the world feel stable, yet quietly
reduce it to the routine.
Practice interrupts that. Not by force. Through tender attention.
In that attention, perception widens beyond the immediate.

Multiple levels begin to show themselves. Not as theory. 
Complexity revealed as lived experience.
For me, these recognitions land on well-cultivated ground.
My years of meditation. Spiritual inquiry. Living unanswerable questions.
So this appreciation is not entirely new. But it is still different.

Thus expanding the nature of attention.
Exercising the cultivation of sensitivity.
Into the multiplicity of dimensions that this human existence extends into and arises
out of.
The repeated act of perceiving anew renews.

The effort to exercise that psychic muscle reconstitutes one’s being.
This requires something often avoided: humility.
To not arrive. To not only conclude. To keep noticing.
To keep practising.
Because contained in any moment of clarity lies the possibility that what is already
there can be reduced.

So the work is not to get it right.
It is to stay in practice. Engaged in the possibilities of what is transpiring.
And to keep abiding in the perpetual practice of perception.

III. Dwelling Amongst Unanswerable Questions
& The Subtle Art of Intermingling

The third thread that continues to reveal itself through the latest Warm Data host
training is absorption in unanswerable questions. This means:

Questions that do not resolve.
Questions that do not land in certainty.
Questions that cannot be neatly answered and put aside.

Nora often brings questions such as:

Where is the edge of oneself, and where is the edge of other?
Who are we to be for each other?
Where is learning actually located?
What is home in a changing world?
Where is agency in a complex system?

These are not questions to be solved.

They are questions to stay with.
To dwell in.
To be in, with, and amongst what they produce.

Into the in-between.

Into the almost-indistinguishable where definitions soften and intermingling becomes possible.
Because something important happens when these questions cannot be closed.
The rational mind cannot easily resolve them.
They cannot be reduced.
They do not allow one to move on easily.
So one is left in them.

In the tension.
In the uncertainty.
In the ambiguity.

And that changes the nature and habits of perception.

In complex living systems, little is easily located.
Where does something begin?
Where does it end?
Where does systemic learning happen?

It is not in one place.
Not in one person.
Not in one moment.

It is relational.
Distributed.
Emergent.

So these questions remain open.

And begin to work on the one engaging in them.

Dwelling in such questions
Requires existential trust.
Careful, patient attention.
Tenderness towards what is.

They require full participation.
Heart.
Mind.
Senses.
Spirit.

They are not just thought about.
They are lived into.

And what arises does not always appear immediately.
It unfolds.
Over time.
Not as neat insight.

But as something lived.

So the practice is not to answer these questions.
It is to remain in, with, and intermingle amongst the dilemmas they pose.

Editor's Note: This article has been published as a triptych as three separate post on Dave Pendle’s LinkedIn, April 2026.

Dave Pendle, founder of (Re)Generative You, is synthesising
almost 30 years experience in non profit enterprises with over 40 years of deep sustained personal development experience. I am passionate about enabling others’ sense of fulfillment, impact and trust, to engage wholeheartedly with inspiration and commitment to 21st century work and life. Stay connected through my Phenomenal Conversations podcast. Compost, connect, and co-create the conditions for a regenerative economic life.

Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, research designer, writer, educator, international lecturer, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute based in Sweden and US. She is the creator of the Warm Data theory and practices.

As a companion to this poetic triptych, watch filmmaker Katie Teague's recently shared conversation with Nora Bateson ALIVING: