The greatest spell · 4:55am Jul 10th, 2020
Our friendships weave together stronger
The bonds grow deeper, lasting longer
And the greatest spell you’ll know
Is how the magic of friendship grows
Something about that stanza makes my heart glow, and I think I figured it out. It’s right. Contained within friendship is a microcosm of everything that makes a thing grow wildly powerful. It’s a spell to grow anything that drives you, especially the things you love.
To cast it, you’ll need to answer these questions. Everything else comes naturally.
- What’s the stuff that matters?
- What fuels the fires?
- How are things connected?
- Where do you want it to go?
I won’t pretend that these are easy questions, but maybe I can help you along the way. Can you start by thinking of a friendship you want to nurture? It could be real or fictional, of a pony with herself, of a large community, or anything in-between. You’ll need a pen and notepad too. (Really.)
Where’s your notebook, Spike?
Question 1: What’s the stuff that matters?
Write down a few words (maybe 1-3) for each thing that’s important to the friendship, and circle them. Leave some blank space on the side, but otherwise scatter your circles haphazardly throughout the page. Conversations, jokes, shared strife, shared goals, history, mutual friends. Anything goes, as long as it matters to you. You can (and should!) expand your list by thinking about what supports the things you’ve already written down.
It’s important here to not put down one-time things. Each circle should represent some pile of things that you can, over time, add on to. If a one-time thing feels important, think hard about what bucket it should go into, and write down that bucket instead.
I’ll spoiler my own list for some fictional characters.
In-jokes, shared habits, conversations, reminders, shared visions, physical contact, comfort, nostalgia, exploring the world, reading together, wandering around together, painting the sky, shared goals.
Question 2: What fuels the fires?
Which of your piles do the most to make your friendship grow? In a sense, these are your motivations. Shade in these piles lightly so they’re easier to pick out.
Shared visions, shared habits, physical contact.
Question 3: How are things connected?
Draw arrows between the piles wherever one thing leads to another. Pay special attention to the circles you’ve shaded in. It’ll look messy, but that’s okay. You can always redraw it later.
Piles with more arrows coming in tend to be how your friendship manifests. Piles with more arrows going out tend to be where the biggest moments happen.
Conversations and comfort have the most arrows coming in. Shared visions and wandering around together have the most arrows going out.
Question 4: Where do you want it to go?
Scatter a few more phrases that describe what else you want your friendship to be. Don’t circle these! Remember again not to put down individual events. Each phrase should represent a pile of things you can add on to.
If all you want is for the friendship to continue, you don’t have to add anything new, but make sure you’ve shaded the piles that are most important to you.
If you find that you can’t connect any of your circled piles to these new piles, spend some time figuring out what other piles you need to add so you can connect them.
Pride and peace. I added in “success” and “acts of bravery” because pride and peace weren’t connected to anything but each other. It looks like this story is going to be an adventure!
That was the last question.
You can relax now.
Step back now and look at what you’ve drawn. That’s a diagram of your friendship, present and future.
- The shaded circles with more outgoing arrows shared visions are fueling your friendship.
- Shaded circles and the arrow sequences pointing into them reminders, shared visions, shared goals, shared habits, physical contact tell you what keeps your friendship going.
- Arrow sequences into the non-circled phrases tell you what to work on and how to do it.
Those four questions are based on (and closely related to) Turing Machines, which is a mathematical model of computers. The resulting diagrams are for handling very complex tasks, like ambiguous personal goals that you need to work on over very long periods of time without a clear way forward. It’s a general strategy for planning out systems so that everything pieces together nicely.
I can easily get overwhelmed by complex tasks if I can’t get a birds-eye view on them. Without a broader perspective, I inevitably start thrashing around trying the latest thing that comes to mind, and I forget about other parts of the picture. When that happens, it’s easy to lose track of the goal and get demotivated.
The piles-and-arrows model helps by making it easy to recognize what “progress” means in a way that eventually leads to the goal. As long as I’m making progress on one of the important piles, I don’t need to worry too much about which pile it is. I’ll get there eventually.
So that’s the spell. I hope you’ll find it as useful as I do.
These questions are roughly what you get when you abstract the definition of a Turing Machine to get primitives that scale better with complexity. There’s an analogous version of these questions for dealing with any system, including organizations and ecosystems. The diagrams also have all the nice properties of a category in category theory, which is really convenient when you want to understand them in more depth.
If you actually followed the steps to create a diagram, I’d love to see it. I know they can get really personal, so I get it if you don’t want to post yours.
I think this is really amazing. I'll.. see about trying out this diagram on Wednesday.
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Godspeed!
People believe emotion and intellect are sperate faculties to different functions, separated without relation, one meaning to deny the other and so on. This system says hell naw bitch. Instead of dividing emotions from intellect it joins them. Each plays off the other. One should become emotional about their intellect—and one intellectual about their emotion.
This process allows you to discover the qualities that spark the positivity of a friendship within you. It allows you to judge in what of your emotions matter to you and what doesn't, chucking one-time occurrences in favour of deeper theme (it's extent unknown and unappreciated until now), everything that emerges with a feeling of passion written down. Things in isolation don't count for much for a holistic view. But once you have the contents of your soul out, strands are noticed, patterns, resemble of qualities and views unique to you.
To even compose a list of those contents, you must first explore them, testing which ones feel right. Your intellect trusts in your emotions to evoke the right piece of information. Once you have all that information, you can become more intellectual about the emotional side from which the information came. Our goal is to join both; not pretend there is a divide.
This is your second blog, and already, I know you have a series on your hands. Never would I think to actually sit down and go through a systematic (and mathematical) route of seeing what friendship means to me, what it's born of, the parts that make it important to me and so on. What you do in these blogs is show the possibility of thought-provoking and character-developing activities most wouldn't find out about in their day to day lives.
And become immensely grateful in their realization for your sharing.
Keep on with the good fight and strut yourself more. These blogs need more viewers. The content you produce deserves to be known.
Catch ya next blog homie!
~ Yr. Pal, B
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That's exactly correct! Intellect grows with motivation and insight, and emotions are a powerful source of both. Emotions are tuned with perspective and judgement, and crucial to both is intellect. Just aligning the two yields huge benefits in the form of passions, but unifying them gives you an entirely new way to fuel yourself.
I'm glad you picked up on that! I have a lot to say about why viewing things in piles boosts a person's ability to see them clearly. This is at the heart of one of the most abstract topics in mathematics. The short version is that things in isolation don't have shapes, and our brains seem to be exceedingly good at giving shape to things not in isolation (i.e., finding patterns). I'll try to elaborate on this in a future post.
While writing this one, I came up with several ideas for more posts. I'll have to spend some time thinking about how to merge topics.
This is turning out to be a lot more fun than I expected. It's a little early to tell, but I think you've made a convert of me.
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I hope you keep with it homie. Others and myself have been greatly enjoyed all that has been written so far. So please continue to write for us.
~ Yr. Pal, B