Are we three or free?

William Wordsworth once wrote that ‘life is divided into three terms – that which was, which is and which will be.’ Three is such a hard number to predict, for the mathematicians who took years to understand the triangle, for the historians who are still trying to understand the pyramids and for astronomers who rely on the fallacy of three so much to understand the future. Whether it’s seeing three people you know on the way to work, the three drains that you can’t walk on or the group of three friends we’re a part of, we experience this difficult number daily and can’t escape it. But is a bad thing or good? In life, love and London is three a crowd?

For some of us we’ve always been stuck in the curse of three friends; the friendship triangle. It seems like an equilibrium that you can’t just escape. When you’re young, it doesn’t hurt so much, but when we grow up it’s constantly on our minds; like the white noise we can’t escape, the pain we can’t get rid of. We all have the concept of three in our lives; there are always two more people around us, two more people thinking about us, two more people on our side. But the friendship triangle is never an easy ride, for we slide in and out of each others triangles moving from one to the next in our lifetime, we may stay permanent in friendships for a long time, or move on with a speedy turnover. Maybe that’s the easy way out of the difficulty, to move through friendships at speed. But what if we can’t, or at least don’t want to move on. When its finally time for you to move triangles, the rust will make a tough ride to let go, so is it worth the ride for the fall? And where do we go, do we have to find the new triangle, do we get ‘recruited’ or is it an automated process?

The pain comes in threes also, first comes the fear, the wondering and the consumption of energy on worry and contemplation, second comes the tears, the loose and hurt, the floods and the feelings, the seething and shattered glass. Finally comes the emptiness, the hole in your gut, the space in your heart, the need to move on with the persistence to stay put.

Naturally, we all move on, we cannot all stay in the same place, be motivated by the same things and feel the same passions for everything. We all have our own lives to lead and cannot buckle on to someone else’s because if we do, when they shake us off the fall could be a long way down. So we have to let go sometimes even if letting go is the hardest thing to do, because right around the corner I promise something good is coming. And the pain will only hurt as long as you let it.

Three is a difficult number, emotional, periodical and painful. But three can also be the best times of your life. Three isn’t out to get you, it is just a cycle that has to happen, and through the experiences and rust we learn who we are. And who we are is the best knowledge of all, because then we know in our heart of hearts that what we was, that what is and that what we will be.

Inspire yourself