Thr33

I’ve always loved the number three. Part of that is probably simple childhood nonsense. I was born on March 3rd, and somewhere in my kid brain that made the number feel important. It was my day. My month. My number. So I started seeing it everywhere.

Triangles. Tripods. Trusses. Bridges.

In 9th grade we built bridges out of pasta and triangles got me an A. A triangle can’t help but hold its shape. Push on a square and it collapses into a rhombus. Push on a triangle and the force moves through it.

I think part of why I love triangles is that they feel reassuring. Stable. Protective. Like visible proof that the structure is going to hold.

Roofs. The hull of a ship. Priorities of work in a patrol base.. The starting fold of a good swaddle. Triangulation while navigating.

For a long time, math scared me. Especially anything that felt “messy” like odd numbers. Fractions that didn’t terminate cleanly. Things that didn’t resolve into neat powers of two.

But eventually another kind of elegance started to chip away at my fear and discomfort: 3, 6, 9, 12...

A dozen. A 24-hour day. The strange practicality of dividing things into thirds. Halves and quarters always felt intuitive to me, but eventually thirds started to feel just as natural. Not because they were simpler, but because I stopped treating unfamiliarity as difficulty.

Expanding my intuition like that gave me not just the confidence to move to the next squishy edge, but also the desire to see what was over there. Three replaced my fear with curiosity.

Two-body systems are clean. Predictable. Stable enough that we can solve them elegantly. Add a third body and suddenly the whole thing erupts into complexity. Such a tiny increase. Just one more participant in the dance and we suddenly have calculable limits to what we can predict.

The three-body problem became, in my mind, a symbol for complexity itself. Not just in celestial mechanics, but everywhere else too. A friendship changes when a third person enters it. Politics changes when a meaningful third party appears.

A disagreement changes when there’s an observer, mediator, therapist, or arbitrator in the room. Three destabilizes simple oppositions. It resists false dichotomies.

Three reminds me that complexity doesn’t require infinite complication. Sometimes all it takes is one additional relationship. Just enough structure to create emergence. Just enough instability to create something alive.

I don’t think any of this means the number itself is magical, but I do think humans are meaning-making creatures, and sometimes certain ideas become anchors for the way we see the world. For me, three became one of those anchors.

A small reminder that the world is usually more connected, more relational, and more interesting than it first appears.