3: Categorisation and the Friend Problem

Sophie the squirrel had many friends. But she had one problem: she always felt sad if her friends did not talk to her or did not invite her. Sometimes, she thought Lily the skunk was best friends with her, but then Sophie didn’t get invited to Lily’s birthday party. Sophie felt sad on that day. She really wished that Lily was friends with her again. 

Sophie stopped talking to Lily in class. She was still very upset. When she came back from school, she talked a lot about Lily, but it was never about them talking or playing together. 

Her mom realized this and asked her what was wrong. Sophie told her everything about what happened. Her mother said, “Sophie, you should know which friend your friend is.” 

Curious, Sophie asked her mom, “What do you mean?” Her mom replied, “You should keep different buckets of friends. One friend falls into the ‘Close Friend’ group, another falls into the ‘Not Close Friends’ group.” 

Sophie loved the idea, but she thought that she would like to start with something simple. She also wanted to make her own buckets. 

Sophie immediately got to work. She took out a sheet of paper and made her own friend groups. This is what she made:

But then she got stuck. Fern the sloth wasn’t a close friend. Neither was he a non-close friend. Where should he go? Soon, Sophie got an idea. She could make a completely new bucket. She would call that bucket, ‘5-minute Hi and Hello friends’. She also realized that Lily went in the ‘5 mins Hi and Hello friends’ bucket. 

mins Hi and Hello friends’ bucket. 

But now she was missing some other friends with whom she would draw, run, play, thumb fight, and play chess. She needed to categorize them too. But there was one more problem: Midnight the owl, who was in the ‘Close friends’ category, was also in the ‘Friends of Activity’ list. 

She was in a dilemma. She then wrote down the problem on a piece of paper like this: What should she name the bucket and where should she put Midnight?

Then, she got an idea and wrote it down as an answer: What should I name the bucket and where should I put Midnight? I should name the bucket Friends of Activity. Midnight can go in both buckets. After all, there is no rule that we can’t put a friend in two buckets. 

With this answer, Sophie immediately completed her buckets like she had before:”

Sophie thought, “Hmm… The ‘Not Close Friends’ bucket isn’t really useful. Maybe I should remove it.” So she removed it. But then she noticed something. Jumper the rabbit had been in that bucket. Now that the bucket was gone, where did he go? 

She tried putting him in ‘Close Friends’. That didn’t feel right. She tried ‘Hi and Hello friends’. That didn’t feel right either. ‘Friends of Activity’? No, they didn’t really do any specific activity together. 

Sophie chewed her pencil for a moment. Then she wrote at the bottom of her paper: “Some friends don’t fit neatly into any bucket. That’s okay too. Maybe Jumper is just… Jumper.”

She drew a small box around his name and left it to the side of her system. So here is the updated version:

Sophie thought to herself, “Sorting Midnight was slightly hard. I didn’t expect her to be in two places! I made these buckets so I know what to expect from each friend, not to rank them.” 

A few days later, Lily mentioned she was going to the movies with Jumper. Before, Sophie would have felt a big “ouch” in her heart and wondered why she wasn’t invited. But she quickly thought of her buckets.

“Lily is in my ‘5-minute Hi and Hello’ bucket,” Sophie reminded herself. “We don’t go to the movies together, and that’s okay. We just say hi in the halls”.

Sophie didn’t feel sad or stop talking to Lily this time. She just smiled, said “Have fun!”, and went to find Midnight to work on their treehouse. Her buckets didn’t just organize her friends; they organized her heart.

Things to learn: Categorization is for understanding a problem. Sometimes a category you seem to need and is logical turns out to be useless; some items can go in multiple places, like how Midnight went inside two buckets. And sometimes, like Jumper, something just doesn’t fit anywhere, and that’s okay too.