8. Bow ties to butterflies - Unknotting life’s crises
Moving out of linear thinking into more a centred approach to choices, drawing from the past, looking toward the future, being in the now
The story so far…
Welcome back to lastest along Towards Gen2200, where we explore living systems and multigenerational thinking—one story at a time. As always, this is more than just a travelogue. This post explores the metaphorical journey of choice-making, using both practical and symbolic ideas to guide us forward. Through reflections on past crises, choices, and the wisdom drawn from generations both ways, we begin to understand how we might better navigate now, the present. The pay-off for those who read the long last post is that this one is SHORT and (relatively) SIMPLE!
New here? Welcome! Last time, I shared my journey deeper into the Snowy Mountains. Today, we’re looking at two powerful metaphors—one from my emergency services work (the bow tie) and another from nature (the butterfly). Both have helped me reflect on crisis management and long-term thinking. For a broader introduction to the ideas behind Gen2200, check out Post 2: Key Concepts of Gen2200.
Navigating crises and choices
As I drove down through the mountains and towards Canberra, I found myself contemplating my priorities. I was moving towards something I needed to understand, and perhaps even take action on. I had set out on the Tread Lightly Experiment with a desire to connect to Country (as far as I could know it) to myself, and to those important to me—family and dear friends I hadn’t seen in years. I was hoping to slow my sense of time down, which was starting to happen, but it didn’t stop the events marching towards me and the choices I’d have to make as they appeared on my horizon. I found myself searching for a framework or principle to help me understand what was going on for me and to guide me through whatever was coming up. As someone steeped in emergency services, I landed on my familiar go-to: the bow-tie model.
A bow tie often has a uniform shape—two loops and a knot in the middle. We usually depict the middle as smooth, but we know there’s often a tangle of cloth beneath.
I learned a concept in emergency management that uses a bow tie as a metaphor. For those curious, here’s an example of the Bow Tie Model applied in emergency management.
The idea is simple, though the actual work of preparing for and then managing crisis can be complex, arduous. And then there’s the long and seemingly never-ending toil of consequence management and, ideally, recovery.
The bow tie model is linear. We move along it from left to right in line with clock and calendar time. On the left side, preparation starts at the tip, moving toward the knot, which represents a crisis. The right side is recovery, addressing the consequences of the crisis. The more effort you put into preparation (on the left side), the smaller and shorter the right side will be—meaning less damage and a faster recovery. If you don’t put enough in on the left (and this is a seemingly impossible task), you have a way bigger and longer right hand bow. Perhaps a little like this image on the chain below. The main loop of right bow is tidy, but the rest of that side has blown out, multiple consequences.
One example we can all relate to right now as a global community: we know we haven’t done enough to mitigate climate change. We're close to—or in—the knot. The consequences will be long and difficult, as we’re not just mitigating but adapting to climate change.
Even in non-emergency life this can apply as anyone who’s retrofitted an old house with insulation, replaced single-pane windows, or added solar panels knows how expensive and challenging that right-side recovery can be. Hence how it had become my go-to model for managing my life. You can see an event coming, even a fun one, and you must get ready for it. If you are late, or don’t do enough, early enough, you are in trouble, and that long tail just goes on and on.
A butterfly’s navigation
While the bow tie serves well for understanding crises and recovery, the butterfly offers a more fluid and dynamic way to navigate ongoing choices.
Butterflies don’t just use their wings for flight; their wings are part of a sophisticated navigation system. They use sun compass navigation, aerodynamic efficiency, vortex control, and even colour perception to make decisions and navigate long migrations.
Sun compass navigation
Butterflies track the sun's position with their wings and antennae, maintaining direction during long migrations.
Aerodynamic efficiency
The overlapping scales on their wings reduce drag and increase lift, allowing smoother, more efficient flight.
Vortex control
Tiny structures on their wings alter the flow of air, helping butterflies manage lift and drag.
Colour perception
Their vibrant wings aid in species recognition, food location, and navigation, helping them make crucial choices along the way.
This metaphor also applies to how we make choices
Unlike the bow tie, which moves from left to right, the butterfly is not linear. All this intricate data—sun, sense of flight and airflow, colour perception—is sensed through the wings by the central body of the butterfly. It’s non-linear, responsive, and variable.
If we imagine ourselves as the centre of the butterfly—its head, thorax, and abdomen—then the wings represent the signals from our past and our sense of the future. That might be minutes, decades or hundred of years. Locating our sense of self in the middle, we remain centred, drawing from both directions, navigating the present with a long-term view. The past and future can guide our decisions now. We are not racked with unhelpful guilt of the past. Neither are we looking at the never ending pain of the onslaught of a terrible future. And we are not stuck in a knot. We are exactly where we need to be. As I type this, I feel a sense of peace washing over me. I hope it brings you the same feeling of calm and clarity.
My family story and choices
Reflecting on my family’s history, I think of my great-grandmother, Ellen. As a teenager in Ireland, she was promised to a man nearly 50 years old. Desperate to escape a that future, she hid a few belongings behind a tree, went to church, and after the service, secretly boarded a ship to Australia—without saying goodbye to her unknowing mother.
Her story highlights the difficult choices people must make, especially when facing impossible situations. She chose her future over her sense of an unhappy, and perhaps short life, and later, her mother followed her to Australia. Perhaps there was forgiveness, perhaps not, but her decision rippled across generations through to me. Her name is my middle name, and my daughter’s middle name. The story is still with us.
On the other side, looking and sensing forward, I think of my responsibility as a mother to my only child. She has only one parent, me. Though I may not become a grandparent, and as both of us are adults, we are free to live our lives in anyway we wish. I had a nagging sense within me that a passing visit while I noisily talked about my exciting adventures and plans, would not pass the ‘relationship building’ test. For my generation, like many before in my fractured culture, it was the norm to leave home young and never look back. The struggle and hurt of leaping out into the world with scant support or guidance follows many of my generation. That we could do this differently was not an apparent choice, until a few years later, a change happened. Most of my siblings stayed home for years while they studied and got themselves established.
This is common these days - we now have the term ‘kidults’.
After the upward walk to the top of Mount Kosciusko, I stood there, trying to call my parents. I did not know at the time that my mother was in the rapid onset of frontal lobe dementia. Her ability to talk, let alone on the phone, was fading fast. I only knew that if she were well, she would have been excited for me. I felt a pull to my stoic, silent generation parents, aging in place. Though my parents never said this, never said they wanted or expected it, I felt a very strong distant call, the Irish responsibility of the eldest daughter. I had a couple more months off work, surely, after a brief visit to Canberra, this was an opportune time to go back and spend with them in their late golden years.
I’d arrived at the knot of the bow without fully appreciating the preparation I had needed to do. Should I return home to be my parents? Follow my adventurous spirit across Australia? Or focus my energy on deepening my connection with my daughter—building a relationship that’s strong, productive, and healthy? Anxiety, I think Freud said once, is the inability to land clearly on one emotion, so you are left going backwards and forwards, caught dithering between them all. In the car as I left Cooma, I knew I didn’t want to feel anxious. I needed a better model to help me.
From bow tie to butterfly
For much of my life, I operated in bow tie scenarios—moving toward crises, anxious about not having done enough preparation on the left side, knowing I’d have to deal with consequences on the right.
When we say in our tough time, ‘I just need to get through this’, we are using the bow tie model. We move through the difficult stuff of the knot, and then through the consequence and, ideally, recovery or even post-traumatic growth. For some, this is a divorce, a death, or a dodgy workplace (the 3 Ds). For me, it was a choice of where to commit my attention, with intention. The trouble with applying the bow tie model to life, is that every thing must be ‘go through’, you end up constantly in crisis. You make crisis out of a perfectly good life. ‘I just need to get through my task list and I’ll have time. I just need to get through the school holidays then I’ll get my sanity back. I just need to get through this novel and I’ll cook dinner.’ Everything is reduced to knots, a complex chore we must get through.
But now, I see the butterfly as a more effective metaphor for choice-making. It’s not about linear progression from preparation to crisis to recovery. It’s about being centred, reading and sense-making of the past and the future from a moving central position. Being present in one’s body is important. If you’re not—as I was uncentered before I went to the Snowies—you are kind of ‘wing surfing’ somewhere and not in control, definitely not sensing the delights of a warm, delicate updraft, or the hope of sunshine on your wings.
Reflecting on my great-grandmother’s choice and my role as a parent, as I drove through that Monaro Valley, I loosened the bow tie’s knot and let it flutter into a butterfly. My choice became clear: I would invest my energy in my daughter, strengthening our bond, knowing that the other responsibilities—family, career, adventure—would follow in their own time. I would extend the care I could for my parents from a distance, though I would not spend the bulk of my leave down there.
Nearly three years later, my life is unrecognisable. My mother has passed, and her voice, once lost in dementia, is now with me every day. In the end, my father, and my other siblings, who live close-by, did the bulk of the caring, for which I’m extremely grateful. On the other side of the wings, my relationship with my daughter is strong, and I work towards a better future for my nieces, nephews, and their grandchildren and others. I may not solve the world's problems, but I always seek to start from a place of grounded awareness—using my metaphorical generational wings to guide me. And with that, you never know.
Applying this to your life
Where in your life do you feel you're approaching a knot in the bow tie? What choices can you make now, with the wisdom of the past guiding you and the voices of future generations calling? Can you shift from the linear, crisis-driven mindset of the bow tie to the balanced, centred perspective of the butterfly?
So what’s this about again?
This Substack is my attempt to get the ‘folly of story’ out of my head and into written thinking on the page, documenting the journey towards Gen2200. It’s also a ‘baton,’ so that eventually everything is here for you to pick the pieces you need, when you need them. As I go, I aim to mature how I express the concepts. For example, I now see that for multigenerational thinking, we first need to be present.
Being connected to self is required before we draw on the voices of the past and consider the needs of the future in our choices. Most of us start off making this connection as babies and children, as described by attachment theories. This connection returned to me, briefly but gently, following my conversation with Maggie when she passed the baton, carried by me as I paddled across the dark lagoon in an inflatable toy canoe, and up the mountain before the next stage of the journey.
Before I explore other Gen2200 ideas, it’s good to first become familiar with yourself—just being you, exactly where you are here and now. This idea is not original. It is the life work of many people across the world and through all the ages. So, it can be yours, too, if you choose.
A hint of action
Have you felt stuck in a knot, unsure how to proceed? What if you allowed yourself the flexibility of a butterfly, listening to both your past and future for guidance?
Where in your life do you feel you're approaching a knot in the bow tie?
What choices can you make now, with the wisdom of the past and the voices of future generations calling?
Can you shift from the linear, crisis-driven mindset of the bow tie to the balanced, centred perspective of the butterfly?
Thank you to all who gave me feedback. Your encouragement and letting me know what landed with you helps shape these posts. If you enjoyed this one, please share it and leave a comment so I know you've read it.
Rolling Takeaways
1. The Case for Quiet is Strong – Post 1 There’s a time to speak, especially in times of uncertainty. Words can set things in motion.
2. Key concepts of Gen2200 – Post 2: Gen2200 is about making decisions today with long-term, multigenerational thinking in mind.
3. Blame the system – Post 3: Systems shape behaviour. When things go wrong, it’s often the system at fault, not the person.
4. Consume or participate? – Post 4: Reflect on your relationship with the world—are you simply consuming the landscape, or are you participating within it?
5. Listening to the Inner Voice – Post 5: The most important insights often come from within. Make space to hear and understand your inner voice—it’s the compass that will guide you toward clarity, balance, and meaningful action.
6. Tuning in to the signs – Post 6: We miss so much going fast. It takes us time to slow down to what feels right and natural. Today’s post hasn’t even touched the sides of slow.
7. Handing on the baton of permission- Post 7 : As you become closer to yourself, all becomes clearer, you don’t need to think, just act in alignment. But don’t allow slip in to think dark thoughts, when you’re surrounded by dark and dangerous waters.
8.Turning bow-ties into butterflies Post 8 - you get to choice your guiding metaphor. I chose between bow ties and butterfly’s. The difference? Imagining the choice of the butterfly allows us to pick up more information to guide us, and we don’t need a plan. We just have to deal with ‘now’, where we are, and which direction we might fly.
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What’s Next?
In the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring why Gen2200 came to life, how it's growing, and the bold steps ahead. You’ll see the threads between my journey, AI's potential, and multigenerational thinking—and you won’t want to miss the twists and insights along the way!
Before you go
Post by post we are walking towards creating Gen2200. Up ahead we will look at systems and multigenerational thinking, warm data, nature, word and thought adventures, and experiment with artificial intelligence.
I mention this here because AI is solidly in my world as is systems thinking, and in weeks up ahead I have some news that shhhh! (Under embargo).
Right now though, I’m floating Gen2200 by teaching generative AI to a range of professionals like you. If you’d like a 90 min session 1:1, reach out to me at Jax@gen2200.com. I have special prices and a few spots left for October.
If you’re curious about where this journey intersects with AI and regenerative thinking, stay tuned—National AI Week is just around the corner. I’ll be offering some insights on Medium and LinkedIn pages and, as always, I’m happy to share more if you’re interested. Oh, and if you enjoyed the photos, feel free to explore more on my Flickr site.
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I read it, over stir fried veg and rice. Enjoying the ride! HS
Thinking back on when I discovered that farfalle means butterfly in Italian. Growing up in rural Australia, pasta meant spaghetti or the occasional macaroni. It wasn’t until the late ’80s, living in Sydney, that I stumbled across all these other shapes and names. It felt like opening a door to a whole new world. Another metaphor shift, I suppose.