Ludic Liberation Lab: Out of Order
Can you play with ICU Delirium?
Dear Liberators,
This email is supposed to announce this January’s Ludic Liberation Lab. For two years, the Lab has happened consistently on second Thursday of every month, except for past July, when I took an intentional vacation to play with Vacation.
But I’m beginning the year in unusual circumstances. The week before New Year’s Eve, my father had a stroke. After a few days at the hospital, he appeared to be recovering, but then had a complication, and is now in intensive care, waiting for brain surgery. The operation is scheduled to take place on Thursday. And so, there will be no Lab this week, because I’m going to be there for my dad, in whatever way makes sense.
Maybe this will disturb you, but during the past two weeks in and out of hospitals (in an American state that’s breaking COVID infection records!), I’m still collecting ideas for games. I believe that it’s possible to play with anything, including scary, gnarly things like fear of death, familial patterns and attachments, bad memories, institutional rules. I’m not always good at liberating myself from games that bring me suffering in the moment, but I’m pretty good at at least noticing that I am playing into some illusion (illusion shares the same root as ludic, from Latin ludere - to play), which is the first step to breaking free from its grip. In a situation of crisis and uncertainty like the one I’m living in, it’s easy to play games of projection, games of panic, games of blame, games of control. I’m grateful for my spiritual practice of ludic liberation to remind me that I’m always playing. The realization invites me to pause and consider if I’d like to revise the rules. In the past two weeks, despite the rollercoaster of fear, frustration, and uncertainty, I’ve also experienced relief, joy, humor, loads of gratitude, wonder, awe, peace, and belonging, thanks to the existential games I chose to play instead (and some very wise and supportive friends who’ve provided crucial “peer therapy”).
In my last Lab Report I invited you to play FEELING COLLECTOR — a year-long existential game, and I shared that my feeling for 2022 is ORDER. The past two weeks have been an intensive bootcamp in ORDER, or more accurately in feeling OUT OF ORDER. One of my dad’s recovery therapists told me that a stroke is like a cabinet falling over, and everything falling out of place. The fall happens quickly, but putting the cabinet back together takes time, repair, sorting things out. Lately, my father has been forgetting dates and imagining things that didn’t happen to him in the hospital. This sounds concerning, especially in context of a brain dysfunction, but his nurse reassured us that this is normal and there’s a name for his condition: ICU Delirium. After patients have been in the hospital for a while, deprived of a full-night’s sleep from constant “gotta check your vitals” interruptions, time and space start to blur together, dreams and waking life look the same, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not.
I’m living my own version of ICU Delirium, losing track of the days and how long I’ve been in my parents’ home, mixing my two languages, trying to sort out my fallen dad of a cabinet. How do we play with this? I’m not sure yet, but I believe we can. Although I can’t be available to host a lab on Thursday, I invite you to join me in crowdsourcing some game ideas about ORDER and its shadows.
Pick a question (or several) from the list below and answer it in the comments. If you feel like you wish you could do something to support to me during this time, play with me – it would be a great help! Asking these kinds of questions is part of the process by which I design existential games, unpacking and exploring a concept and its role in our lives. Next week, I will write a Lab Report on the findings, maybe even include a game that emerges from your answers.
EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS ABOUT ORDER, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER.
What are ways you play with order in your life? How do you know something is in order, or out of it?
What’s something you have “in order” that pleases you? How did you get it to be like that? What was the process/effort of “ordering”?
What’s something that you feel you need to “get in order”? What about it is out of order? How does that make you feel?
Do you ever like to alter your sense of order? How?
What’s pleasurable about “having” order and “not having it”?
What’s the opposite of order? Is it Chaos? Mess? Disorder? Randomness?
What do you associate with order most: sequence, things in their place, hierarchy/organizational order, patterns, divine intelligence, buying things, commands, something else? What specific examples come to mind when you think of these categories?
What would be scariest to forget: a) your name; b) your kin-relations; c) what date it is; d) where you live; e) what you “do” f) what happened to you?
Does order always have to require effort, or is some order effortless?
Please answer these questions in the comments! If you prefer to respond more privately, you can email me directly or fill it this anonymous survey instead.
As always, thank you for contributing to participatory research into playful liberation.
In Play and Liberation from ICU Delirium,
Natalia
Existential Game Maker/Destroyer
So sorry to hear about your father. I appreciate these questions, which make me think about the extent to which the ordering process used to feel fairly organic for me. There was a kind of fluid virtuosity to the ongoing calculation that allowed me to use everything in the fridge before it expired, or the protocols that I used to organize my research processes, etc. These were systems that made the mundane feel beautiful, like a harmonious and supportive low-friction world that I constructed as I moved through it. I guess it felt like a kind of mastery, albeit an embedded one. I think I've been feeling the loss of this organically evolving order pretty intensely for the past few years. This is in part covid, but also health issues that required me to take up a restricted diet, which is much more ordered than before, but ironically makes me feel exhausted, unable to tap into my own mundane creativity, rather than free. This is perhaps a response to your last question then: order used to feel effortless, like breathing, and now it feels labored, and I don't know that I'll ever get back to feeling free. The obvious answer is that I might renaturalize a new order through practice, but what you're wanting is the opposite: to denaturalize and consciously shift the rules.
I am so sorry that your dad and you and your family are going through this. Please take care of yourself, even as you take care of your family. Order for me feels like an effortless, clean, easy routine without hiccups (like knocking things over, dropping things, or my sweatpants getting inadvertently and unknowingly caught on my kitchen drawer pulls. For real, that last example embodies what the opposite of order feels like for me.) I love it when the things I use on a daily basis are ordered: kitchen and bathroom supplies and cabinets. By order I mean that everything I use is clearly visible with space around it, making it easy to grab and do my thing. It also means that I do not have extra “stuff” that I do not use. I regularly (twice a year at least) go through and declutter often used spaces, throwing away or giving away things I don’t use. The one space in my life that I have not been able to order since my divorce is my garage. My ex backed his car out and just left everything else in the garage, 20 years of life lived together. (I’ve been able to “order” everything in the house as he just up and left all that too.) But for some reason the garage is overwhelming. It is filled with old camping gear, old baby furniture, old beach gear…remnants of a life he just backed out of. When I go in there (to grab the odd supply of to attempt to clear it) I end up sitting in an old high back chair we have in there, and I sob. I just cry….still to this day…3 years after he backed out. He was a bit of a hoarder and liked a lot of “stuff” around him “in case he needed it.” Quite the opposite of me, and chaotic, now that I think about it. I have this dream of selling my too large home (with still too much stuff) when my kid graduates and buying a tiny house somewhere near the water…with only the things I need and use: 5 mugs, a few utensils, two towels, etc…. That kind of order, that kind of clean slate, that feels like ease, freedom, simplicity. I dream of order I suppose. The opposite of order for me is chaos, clutter, too much “stuff.” When the stuff gets in the way of just living and going about my day with ease…that feels like chaos. If I am being honest: order also includes a lot less people around me, and a lot more open space. Sigh….you have me dreaming of a new life. My plan until I get there is to do a bit of traveling and to stay in tiny houses as I travel, to get a taste of that order and simplicity (and perhaps some ideas.) Thanks for asking these questions. Please know I am thinking about you and your family.