Align Your Orbit: Paradox
Align Your Orbit is a monthly series of philosophical and somatic experiments to guide you toward intentionality and impact in your daily life. These are games to inspire intuition, so please adapt the offerings to fit you and find delight in how you engage.
One fan wiki of the White Wolf game, Mage the Ascension, calls Paradox the inertia of six million gallons of belief. It’s the force of consensus reality with its own physics of retribution. It’s the current that both fuels mages’ power and punishes them for abuse of it.
But maybe it’s time to put Paradox itself under scrutiny.
Let’s recap: the US Supreme Court systemically stripped our rights, there’s a global war, and inflation’s about to starve us all out.
Welcome to dystopia. You’ve been here the whole time. Reveal social refinement as hideous. Turn the present inside out. Believe change happens overnight. Be direct and unflinching. Make what’s permanent temporary. No one deserves your apology.
We’ll win by photo finish.
Want to experience this month’s offerings as a Spotify playlist?
Experiments for July
1. Thrive and Survive – Our chosen families and support networks have never felt wider, but we need them more than ever. Zoom in on pleasure before you zoom out and initiate action. Hold personal joy separate from collective grief, but give yourself over to each completely. Average nothing out.
Challenge Mode: It’s time for public displays of affection. Embrace every consenting person as often as possible. Make love visible. Cling.
2. Ask Forgiveness, Not Permission – There’s working within the system, and then there’s dirtying your hands. Don’t let bureaucracy determine the pace of progress. Act alone in the face of indifference.
Challenge Mode: Anti-transparency is the cornerstone of capitalism. Use your privilege. Talk about your wages. Speak plainly about unfairness. Squeak the wheel.
3. It’s Not a Soap Opera – Save dramatic irony for fiction and television. You’re old enough to speak in thesis statements. Come out with what you mean and expect nothing less from others. Make it clear that you’ll throw fireballs down the street if you want to.
Challenge Mode: Create gestures, code, and inside jokes with anyone you trust. Speak on multiple layers at once. Every word is a pun.
4. Transact – Want something? Don’t compromise; exchange. Ask, what can I do for you to get __________? Value time, energy, stamina, and boundaries. Don’t forget that money is only shorthand.
Challenge Mode: Make offerings to your body in the form of expressive joy. Wear clip-on jewelry and defy the binary. Dance until all the aches leave your physical form.
Please tell us how these experiments are working for you!
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Andra’s Recap of June’s Experiments
The theme for June was Choose Your Mess with experiments around reinvesting in relationships, bulking up, picking your poison (and letting others pick theirs), and crying with majesty.
Regarding relationships, I took some very big steps in solidifying the foundations of how I currently relate with others and made some long-term commitments. The most helpful ideology around that included realizing that, any time I make a long-term commitment, I am not committing to that person in statis; I am committing to them as a constantly evolving person. In that way, I can trust that we will continue to grow and improve together.
Choosing my mess with relationships also meant choosing out of messes I no longer wanted. I found, after much soul searching and discussions in my community, that continuing to stay friends with a person who violated my consent was giving others the impression that my friend was a safe person to be around. It was a heartbreaking perspective but one that I needed to make informed decisions for myself and my community.
In terms of preventing boundary compromise, Ash and I had conversations about how it’s more important to let one or the other person get their way completely some of the time than for both to get half all the time. This significantly decreases relationship fatigue.
Bulking up has been a big deal for me as I try to strengthen my quad muscles to protect my knees at my very physically involved job. I’ve been doing lunges and have tried to pick my legs up higher when I step. I’ve also been called to start using my bike again to keep my knees circulating, so I’m not just walking all the time.
In light of that, though, I have been modifying my systems and taking the easier way out when possible to protect my body.
While I’ve had a difficult roller coaster of a relationship with marijuana, I do feel the most bonded to it than any other substance. I like how it makes me and my body feel, and I love the self-knowledge it gives me. As a commitment to myself, I have pledged to only use 1:1 CBD to THC to balance out the effects, and so far that is going very well. I also appreciated the permission to allow others to work with the substances they most bond with.
I enjoyed thinking about what it means to cry with majesty. I first learned about this concept on a transmasculine support group from a firsthand anecdote about the experience of being more prone to “tears of majesty” after going on testosterone. Fascinating.
The biggest moment of majesty I had this month occurred while I was outside tending my plants. I was holding a shovel and just marveling at how well things were growing, mostly on their own. I felt such a pride and love in that moment, and I did feel like crying. When Ash and I talked about it later, they said that the experience is something like a parental sensation without ego or specifically the impulse to think this is mine or this is all because of me. It’s an open-handed recognition of growth. I’m looking forward to feeling more of that as I begin my own journey toward becoming a parent.
It was a dense month! Thanks for being here for it and for intentionally charting your course through the madness. Enjoy this month’s experiments!