We’ve always known life comes in threes.
The ancients spoke of body, spirit, and soul.
Philosophers wrote of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Faith traditions echoed Father, Son, and Spirit in the West,
and Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Parvati in the East —
wisdom, abundance, and strength.
Even our stories keep repeating the pattern: birth, death, renewal.
Three is how we remember balance.
Three is how we survive, and then, how we live.
The First Thread: Survival
Survival is how the body endures.
For as long as there have been humans, our bodies have carried us through what should have ended us.
Fire against the cold.
Shelter against the storm.
Medicine against the plague.
Survival is instinct.
The first inheritance.
The reason we are still here at all.
In the West, the Stoics trained for hardship — fasting, walking barefoot, practicing loss so that the body could endure what was to come.
In the East, Ayurveda taught balance — that survival is not brute strength, but harmony of food, breath, and earth.
Anthropologists remind us it was cooperation, not competition, that gave us the edge.
Survival is never only individual. It is what we carried together.
But survival alone doesn’t explain the whole story.
It only tells how we kept breathing.
The Second Thread: Longing
Longing is how the spirit endures.
When we were exiled, it was longing that sang us home.
When we grieved, it was longing that named our ache.
When we reached for God, it was longing that gave us prayer.
Cultures gave it names:
- The Portuguese call it saudade — a bittersweet ache for what is gone.
- The Germans call it sehnsucht — an impossible yearning for what could be.
- The Tamils call it ஏக்கம் (ēkkam) — an ache of the heart, a yearning so deep it spills into poetry, music, and prayer.
Poets gave it voice.
C.S. Lewis called longing “the inconsolable secret,” the echo of a tune not yet heard.
Andal, the Tamil mystic, burned with longing for God, her words like fire in verse.
Tagore wrote of unfinished music, of songs that ache because they remain unsung.
Longing is what made us human.
It turned instinct into imagination.
It gave birth to songs, to stories, to rituals and love.
But longing alone can still leave us restless.
It can sing us through the night, but not carry us beyond the horizon.
For that, we needed something more.
Something that did not just ache, but release.
The Third Thread: Transcendence
Transcendence is how the soul endures.
The body can only last so long.
The spirit can only reach so far.
The soul is what carries us beyond both.
In the West, mystics dissolved themselves into God like salt in water. Hegel saw desire transformed into Spirit through recognition and work. Frankl, in the camps, showed that meaning could outlast even suffering itself.
In the East, the Upanishads declared the soul (ātman) one with the eternal. The Bhagavad Gita urged Arjuna to act without attachment — transcendence as release, not escape. Tamil Siddhars sang of bodies turning into light.
Transcendence is the act of letting go, the grace of rising beyond ourselves.
We’ve looked at death and dared to believe it isn’t the end;
we’ve faced our limits and, even there, whispered into the silence that there must be more —
and it is this whisper, stretched across centuries, that has carried the soul beyond both survival and longing.
It is transcendence that has given humanity not just endurance, not just longing—
but hope.
The Thread Between All Things
This is how we’ve come this far as humanity:
- Survival carried our bodies.
- Longing carried our spirits.
- Transcendence carried our souls.
The story of being human isn’t just about endurance.
It’s about the ache that made us sing,
and the grace that called us home.
It comes in threes—again.
Body, spirit, soul.
Survival, longing, transcendence.
These are not just echoes of the past.
They are the forces that have carried us through history.
And they are the same three forces that gave birth to L.I.F.E.
Living.
Intentionally.
For.
Evolving.
This is how we have always endured.
This is how we will endure still.
Explore More
Looking for stories shaped by these patterns?
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