Twelve

Can we group ourselves into twelves, and if so, what would happen next?

That is the question here at Twelve.

Would it be disastrous?

Would it be powerful?

Would it be fruitful?

Here is my best vision-casting— because I am an eternal optimist and I think that we are wholes-within-wholes that have all experienced moments of great connection and joy in human relationships. We are fundamentally social creatures. We can only describe our lives as good, healthy, or whole if we have fruitful connections with our spouses/children/friends/relatives/neighbors/coworkers/

And THAT is a very beautiful thing.

It makes for many of life’s great days, season, and moments.

Yet, there is often an existential ache in our collective bones because few of us can say that that beautiful level of relationality is our “default setting”.

Instead, they are perhaps fleeting moments.

A big part of adult reality is the realization that friends move away, family members get sick, and loved ones can let us down.

There is even death.

This reality is both glorious and brutal.

Throughout much of this life, we long for a “greater connection”. Something that can match our desire for belonging, intimacy, and wholeness.

So…

Imagine having small, supportive groups of up to twelve people, where we help each other in every aspect of life—emotional, practical, and spiritual. In a group this size, deep, personal connections are formed, fostering trust, accountability, and genuine care. It’s large enough to offer diverse perspectives but small enough to stay intimate. Together, we solve problems, grow spiritually, and share responsibilities, creating balance and resilience. By combining strengths and supporting one another holistically, we build a more connected, empowered way of living—where no one faces life’s challenges alone.

A (hopefully small) proportion of us will look at our lives and be unable to find twelve people with whom there is a genuine, healthy human relationship.

Loneliness is a stark reality and a lethal infection that seems to thrive in technologically advanced, internet heavy societies. We can have all of the information in the world, yet lose our soul in disconnected isolation.

Yet the vast majority of western moderns find ourselves in a completely different social reality. To imagine who our twelve strongest bonds are is a difficult task because we naturally want to believe that we have good connections with the hundreds or thousands of friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, gym-goers, classmates, baristas, acquaintances, digital followers, childhood crushes etc. that constitute our social circle/tribe/network/family.

Which can be OVERWHELMING at times.

Right?

It can sometimes feel like: okay so I have one spouse and no kids and seven childhood besties and three great lads from college and a nice neighbor named Greg and two parents and thirteen aunts/uncles/grandparents/cousins and nine work colleagues and I want to maintain all of these relationships and love them and be loved by them so is there like a formula or algorithm that can determine the optimal level of love that I should give to each person whilst also maintaining my sanity….

???

It is normal to task our brains with solving this riddle.

Yet this is actually a question for the soul.

Let’s go below the head level and us these two questions instead:

How have I cultivated deep, sustainable, and fruitful connections with my fellow people?

Is my soul at peace or is there a longing?

Just for fun— let’s see what happens when try to answer this soul-level question with our big fancy prefrontal-cortexted brains. And to give our intelligence a boost, we will consult our newest, flashiest, most technologically advanced large language model.

Prompt:

Can you create a formula or algorithm for this relational scenario and tell me how to determine the optimal level of love that I should give to each person whilst maintaining sanity? Here is the scenario: okay I have one spouse and no kids and seven childhood besties and three great lads from college and a nice neighbor named Greg and two parents and thirteen aunts/uncles/grandparents/cousins.

The response?

PURE BRILLIANCE

This is the revolutionary algorithm that the model gave me:

Followed by the sweetest ten words in the English language:

“Where P is the proportion of love for each person”.

Surely this is the hidden formula! — lost to the mysteries of the universe — that will unleash happiness onto the world by renewing and evolving our relational lives.

Here is the solution:

WE DID IT!!!

We solved love. It was tricky but we outsmarted it in the end.

And just imagine these brand-new sentences entering the world:

Hey sorry babe I know we just sat down to dinner and you want to process your stressful day at work but I’m afraid we’ve already exhausted the 5.53 love units that I allocated you this week.

Grandma! — as I have told you multiple times — you are just one sixty-third (or 1.59%) of my love budget but I swear these chocolate-chip cookies are so good that we should recalculate!

Whoah whoah there easy now Greg… that’s it… just calm down. You’re okay…that’s it. You see, I can’t have you sharing any more of these personal problems with me — they simply aren’t in the budget. The scope of our engagement is mostly weather-related anecdotes and lawn-care tips.

Okay that is enough.

Because we all know that human connection is not an intellectual pursuit.

It is a soul experience.

Or something like that right ?

We know that we are already experiencing this “soul-level” sense of belonging to some degree. Our friends are in town, our family is healthy, it is summertime, and we are hanging out with all of our favorite people and for a moment there is wholeness.

The soul finds peace.

But then its over and your aunts are arguing about something that is absolute drivel like which brand of plastic forks are the best.

So, what gives? Why are we experiencing loneliness on one end of the spectrum and overwhelming social anxiety at the other? Are we programmed incorrectly? Are we finding our present tech-fueled, “hyperconnected” reality has created two illusions:

With technology providing a medium, we can become more connected than any prior generations in history.
If there is a gnawing sense of fracture, loneliness, or fatigue— it is a problem that our minds can solve. We just need some more information.

Again, we are talking about the soul here.

And we want to discover what the soul wants.

Now our hearts may be saying that what we’re experiencing is not right or best.

There are great “whole-making” moments, but they are the exceptions.

If this is felt, should it seem odd to us?

Inquisitive?

Because there are “matches” for a lot of my other desires. Hunger has food, thirst has water, horniness has sex, tiredness has naps.

But belonging?

Being at home in your body, while also being part of a greater “body”?

Connection?

Relational wholeness?

Is it for us?

Do we have a match?

Yes, of course! The ingredients are already here. We have an answer to the knock. We have a match to our desire.

Most simply— our longing for belonging is met in other people, right?

*I believe dogs are a close 2nd and they sometimes hold us down when no one else does!

And belonging includes both breadth and depth. It is not a game of “whoever has the most friends wins” even though this is the game that social media wants to play.

We want depth in our relationships which is to say that we want to know and to be known by others.

For visual people— this is where dodecagons come in.

This is a great shape.

And this is my idealistic, somewhat bizarre, and overly-simplistic idea:

We visualize our CORE relationships as existing in this shape as a way to have focus and intentionality with our loved ones. And it’s limitation is merely a reflection of our own limitations: time, energy, and money.

Please note— there is nothing significant or “right” about a dodecagon or the number twelve.

You might even find yourself to be more of a tridecagon (13) person.

And listen— if that is the case…

If you want to conceptualize your core relationships as a thirteen, or five, or seventeen-sided shape…

I will still love you.

But just know that ultimately you are outside of our kingdom of god and you will spend the rest of eternity in conscious torment for your wrongness.

Just playin— there is no eschatological squabble between the dodecagons and the tridecagons, because again— we are just making this up as we go along.

The hopeful power of this idea is the simplicity.

Write down twelve of your closest ties. Your highest loves and your most loyal friends. Maybe the ones who raised you? Your favorite lads from college? Neighbor Greg?

Who are your twelve?

10.

11.

12.

If this feels rigid and/or clinical, remember that the question is “who constitute your most fruitful, loving relationships”, not “who are on the VIP list for your personal club”.

Immediate family members? Naturally.

Those best friends? Hell yeah.

Siblings? Sure.

The reality is that these people will evolve over time. Change truly is the only constant. Sometimes our best friend moves far far away. Or we get a new job. Or our mom dies. Or we met this really cool and funny and nice person at the gym and want to see them more often. Or we have a fallout with neighbor Greg because his cats keep pooping on our porch. Or we just gave birth to triplets!

Not only is that change okay — it is the operative pattern to life. Yet the beauty and efficacy of a twelve-sided shape is that simplicity can engage with the complexities of modern life. It can be conceptually grasped by a child and yet the reality is that a group of twelve people yield one-hundred and forty-four unique relationships. And each individual is an infinitely complex web of their own experiences, education, and environment.

There is no lack of exploration here.

Like what happens when myself, my mother-in-law, neighbor Greg, and my gym buddies go to that farmer’s market on Saturday ?

This this isn’t a VIP club. Where you then go around shunning the other eight billion people on the planet and act like a bitch to your former colleague Merideth when you see her at Costco.

The shape—

This simply asks that we be intentional about cultivating our relationships with the people who are already in our lives. And perhaps we should “draw a circle” around the fact that we do not have unlimited time, energy, or money. And clearly the internet, ChatGPT, or our big brains are equipped to provide what the soul is longing for.

Life is also fucking hard.

And confusing.

And weird.

So what if we got to do this whole thing as part of a team?

What if we had teammates? Who we loved and supported while they loved and supported us?

You could even call this concept a church.

The church ?

This is not radical or new — and we are all already doing this — but I fear that our personal construction of our team or church or “inner circle” or tribe or gang or camp has become quite the formula.

Like this.

We want answers and intelligence and speed and more and bigger and greater and right now. That is (shockingly) also what the ego wants.

The soul just wants to be here.

To be present.

To not feel alone or overwhelmed.

To belong right where it is.

So what do we think this would look like in our individual lives if this was a reality?

Would we invite some (or all) of these people into our home for dinner and what would the group want to do after?

Read from the bible?

Listen to Shawn Mendes?

Powerpoint presentations about the phenomenon of platypi?

Wine and paint night?

Collect a portion of the combined incomes so that one needy person in our midst can become less needy?

Go bowling?

Talk about our deepest fears? Or the things we feel most guilty for?

Look at planets and stars through a telescope?

Or just all go home early to sleep?

GREAT!

Sounds amazing.

Why not?

There are truly no rules.

And that is the 2nd point. There is tremendous freedom here, and again love only flows if it is free. And not free as in “no financial value”, I mean FREE as in there isn’t a single string attached.

Twelve is just a number, and its limitation is only a reflection of the reality that0 we are also limited. Yet let’s not confuse limitation for brokenness. We can be limited and whole at the same time.

A single starling is perhaps limited in its ability to inspire awe and wonder in us, yet it knows how to be part of a whole in a beautiful and meaningful way.

Starling video?

Do starlings know something we don’t?

So again, I ask us to:

Imagine organizing ourselves into small, supportive groups of up to twelve people, where we help each other in every aspect of life—emotional, practical, and spiritual. In a group this size, deep, personal connections are formed, fostering trust, accountability, and genuine care. It’s large enough to offer diverse perspectives but small enough to stay intimate. Together, we solve problems, grow spiritually, and share responsibilities, creating balance and resilience. By combining strengths and supporting one another holistically, we build a more connected, empowered way of living—where no one faces life’s challenges alone.

If you fancy some electronic-mail correspondence on this subject or any other subject — the address is lilothebrainchild@gmail.com.