IT'S A WORLD OF THREE'S

If ever you've walked the lonely streets of the city at night, you can sense it. Among the echos of empty avenues dotted with the occasional street cleaner and patrolling squad car, you can sense how the world is made up of night people and day people. Two very different creatures, really.

Just like other two's: Right brained and left brained...young and old...rich and poor...believers and non-believers ...Democrats and Republican...Wall Street and Main Street...celebrities and anonymous...optimists and pessimists .... sane and insane [well, the distinctions between these two are a little harder to pin down].

Here's the point. Each of us is an amazingly unique and unrepeatable act. But in that uniqueness we tend to pair off into either one thing or its opposite. Seems so much simpler that way. Something like the binary rule in the world of computers, where there is either 1 or 0. Everything else flows from these opposites

But does it...?

Perhaps computers require the credulity of a simple binary system, but humans are more complicated than that. No matter how black-and-white our simplistic minds insist on dividing the world, there are at least three not two of everything. Somewhere tucked in between our favorite extremes, there are an infinite number of nuanced a-little-of-this-and-a-little-of-that thinking.

These are the folks who don't quite fit under the simple auspices of either of the two extremes. These are the on-the-hand thinkers and doers. These are those among us who are blessedly cursed with a third eye with which to see just a little more than our passionate either/or zealots.

Come to think of it, this notion of threes versus twos can be found in the most important places. For instance, in the West we have the Holy Trinity. In the East we have the three Hindu Gods of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. And everywhere we now have the three genders of humanity: Male, Female & Computer.

Maybe it's time to shed the simple, and get more complicated. As God (or Evolution) intended. The only losers might be today's self-righteous either/or zealots clattering from Alaska to Washington and from FOX to MSNBC. A loss I could live with....!