Help! My Heart is Full of Pony! - Empty Spaces · 6:04pm Aug 31st, 2017
The recent eclipse really got me thinking. In my life, I have explored a variety of different philosophies, paths, and faiths. I'm not going to get into the details of any of them, because frankly, that's all pretty personal, and not terribly relevant to the point I want to make.
However, suffice it to say that, as a kid, and as a young adult, I always tended to think rather heavily about big philosophical questions. I also visualized rather a lot, imagining the answers that might be found in mysterious empty spaces – the space between electrons in an atom, between planets in a star system, between stars in a galaxy. I contemplated the invisible stuff holding it all togather, both scientifically (dark matter), and conceptually (Plato's grand question: "what the ultimate essence of ____?").
I'm not going to claim that My Little Pony is so deep that it answers questions that are as old as sapient thought itself. However, after spending a considerable amount of time obsessing about Horse Show, relishing the optimism, and the friendship, and the morals, and "the feels," my outlook started to change. Pony put me in a new groove, and that ultimately lead me to confront these age-old questions from a different angle than I had ever dreamt of before.
Rather than looking for the divine (and I use that term very loosely) in the space between planets, I saw it plain as day in the space between hearts.
Friendship is a strangely magical thing when you think about it.
It moves us to push ourselves to the limit - to put our own comfort aside - our own fears. It's the reason so many of us get out of bed in the morning, the reason we go to work, the reason we deprive ourselves of sleep during those late nights when we are needed.
It defines our moral character - how we treat others, how we strive to be treated. It makes us who we are, and in the best of circumstances, pushes us to become who we ought to be.
It's a force too massive to easily define, and yet all of it exists in those empty spaces. The stuff that ties us all together. Like the gravity that attracts every atom in the Universe to every other atom in the Universe, we too are connected in ways we cannot see.
Friendship is the most noble expression of that. Friendship is magic.
-Sprocket
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Indeed, Sprocket, indeed!
I believe that you and I have perhaps journied similar paths, as much of which you wrote here reflects my own thoughts on how I feel Pony has affected my outlook on life. Friendship is very much the 'thing' that binds us together, inspires us to reach out and think beyond ourselves.
I can say for myself, that I am much different and I hope a much better person than I was before. For me, Amicieita est Veneficus!