We’re always fighting time. Trying to get more of it. Trying to make more of it. Trying to see where it’s gone missing in plain sight. We keep reminding ourselves everyone gets the same 24 hours a day even though we’re fully aware not everyone has the same privileges or life situation to work with.

I especially felt time beating upon me as we watched our daughter grow and celebrate her first birthday. It doesn’t seem possible that a tiny human could change that much in a year. And yet. Millions of babies do it every year, without fail, without ever once stumbling upon the Fountain of Ever-Youth and remaining in their current form for more than a few days.

I’ve always been drawn to the aura of knight armor, and yet looking back at the picture I drew, I can’t help but think about how armor eventually went out of style. Something far more efficient took its place. Something easier to move in. Something you didn’t drown in sweat from. Over time, the materials got better, lighter, and stronger. Things evolved.

And yet. We’re still fighting.

Time is all about framing. It is what you make of it. It can be your friend or your enemy, and sometimes both at once. How we view time says far more about us than anything ticking or tocking. It says how we feel about the way we spend our lives. It says how much we build it out with being busy. Time can be your adversary or it can be your companion, the pacemaker walking alongside you, quiet and steady, simply doing a thankless job. Time, in its best moments, can even disappear inside a world in which seconds become hours and hours become seconds, when the expansion and contraction of the universe around us reminds us, in those beautiful, fleeting moments, that there just may be some magic left in this world.

The internet has warped our brains to think we need a bigger audience than necessary. The likes, the loves, the retweets, the emoji responses – it all minimizes pure human interaction into such a confining form that we can’t help but feel wanting of more. One of the more reassuring things my younger 20-something read is when Kevin Kelly wrote about how you really only need 1,000 true fans to have a career. If you get them, they will follow you wherever you go and will sustain you through painful droughts. I think about this a lot as some of my favorite writers – people who’ve made a clear impact on me – have increasingly moved to Substack. The ongoing disruption of social media – especially in Twitter – has forced creators to find their true fans.

When I drew this picture, I thought about how you only really need three true fans in your life. You need at least three people who know who you are and who will give you the space to walk around and vent with your pokier edges. These are the people who’ve seen you through your highs, lows, and many in-betweens. They’re the few people you feel like truly get you. And when shit gets really heated, they’re what you can count on to whir around and cool you down. To make you feel refreshed.

From Alice Wu’s transcendent The Half of It (on Netflix), there’s been a movie line that’s rattled within my brain since first viewing:

“I had a painting teacher once tell me that the difference between a good painting and a great painting is typically five strokes. And they’re usually the five boldest strokes in the painting. The question, of course, is which five strokes?”

– Aster Flores, The Half of It

When I got toward the end of this fan drawing, I started inking it before I realized there were no motion lines. There was no indication the fan was doing what a fan is supposed to do. It just sat there. I didn’t have the confidence to really add another potential five strokes, to take it from a half-baked, decent idea to something more whole. I didn’t even know what the five strokes would be. So I let it be.

The universe has a way of rhyming. At the time I left the drawing alone, my rationale was that your three fans should be there when nothing is going for you. When there’s no real motion worth supporting. When you’re stuck, waiting for another wave to run over you and pull you in. And then as I went through these blog posts, I thought about the number 3 again and the struggle to list things smoothly in ASL.

Perhaps it’s just another reminder that 3 will always be enough.

Note: back in October 2021, I challenged myself to use the Inktober prompts to create one black-and-white piece of art each day. I would then learn how to vectorize them in Adobe Illustrator and make some cool digital art. Two things happened in the meantime: 1) Illustrator’s learning curve proved steeper than I could find time or focus for, and 2) I started writing pieces alongside them as a writing exercise. INKTHINK is a series combining the two for the next 31 days.

Spirit is like butter on toast. Used so often and spread so thin in its use and definition that it often disappears within the bread, only visible in its gleam under certain lights. You could forget its presence until you take a bite. By then, there’s no way to deny it. It’s there, deep within everything.

The ASL sign for ghost looks the same as spirit. Both have the nondominant hand with an index finger and thumb touching while the other hand makes the same shape and draws out a squiggly line.

You could be led to think they’re the same. But the ghost haunts; the spirit reminds us of what’s possible. The attainable absolution. The brewing brain. The creative connection.

When I think about spirit, I think about how it makes our body lighter, almost immaterial. It emanates from within and makes our bodies a silhouette, a shadow behind it all. Suddenly, the aches and pains go away. The worries about money disappear. The stress that wore you down has subsided, if only for a few brief moments. The world feels a little bigger, a little wider. What didn’t seem possible before now flickers within you, a warm, neon sign saying Here I Am, Ready To Go Wherever This May Take Me.

Note: back in October 2021, I challenged myself to use the Inktober prompts to create one black-and-white piece of art each day. I would then learn how to vectorize them in Adobe Illustrator and make some cool digital art. Two things happened in the meantime: 1) Illustrator’s learning curve proved steeper than I could find time or focus for, and 2) I started writing pieces alongside them as a writing exercise. INKTHINK is a series combining the two for the next 31 days.

Among the many disappointments at the end of the Game of Thrones TV series, one of the quirkier ones is how much ground was laid for a three-eyed raven that never quite paid off. Time and time again we were given dark, ominous shots of this raven, urged to believe it was something of great importance, something that would actually shift the narrative ground beneath us. Perhaps they eventually realized three-eyed ravens were not as cool as fire-breathing dragons.

Stepping into the waters of A Wiki of Fire and Ice only confused me further, so I will stick to what I initially took the raven to be: something that could see the past, the present, and the future. Visually, it made sense. But two and a half years after the wet fart of a series conclusion, I think of the three-eyed raven less as a metaphor for the story and far more as a reminder of how dangerous it is to get hung up on dancing in time. Being able to see the past, the present, and the future could lead to some pretty cool stories, maybe even some groundbreaking realizations. But it’s one thing to see something. It’s another to do something about it. It’s another thing entirely to get other people to do something about it, especially when you’ve told them that particular thing came to you from a three-eyed raven. We’ve seen these last two years that many people in our country will stick to their own facts to fit their own narrative, of which serves the community they believe themselves to be part of. There are many three-eyed ravens fluttering about these days. No wonder the horizon can sometimes look so perilous.

What I prefer, instead, is the four-eyed raven. Just a regular old raven with some glasses, admitting to their myopia and recognizing the need for some corrective vision lens to help them see the situation more clearly. And then when someone comes to them with their own observations, they’re willing to look at another vision and interpret it through their own lens again. That’s all meaning-making is. You remain flexible so that different truths may help you better understand the world. It’s a constant, ever-shifting process. And when you get lost in the weeds, you can do that thing birds love to do: zoom out and fly over it all.

Note: back in October 2021, I challenged myself to use the Inktober prompts to create one black-and-white piece of art each day. I would then learn how to vectorize them in Adobe Illustrator and make some cool digital art. Two things happened in the meantime: 1) Illustrator’s learning curve proved steeper than I could find time or focus for, and 2) I started writing pieces alongside them as a writing exercise. INKTHINK is a series combining the two for the next 31 days.

I have rarely met a knot that didn’t make me anxious. I could appreciate them – the way they’d tie a boat securely to the dock, the way they’d hold a tent up in high winds, the way they’d represent a promise of something difficult to unravel – but I had no idea how to make them. And the thing about learning how to do a knot is you have to watch it being done while being told how to do it at the same time. Any Deaf person knows this is a fool’s errand. Something will get lost in translation. You will think it can’t be much different than tying your own shoes and yet every single time you make a knot, you feel the give. It’s not something to be trusted. 

But there is a knot I can entertain: the Triquetra – otherwise known as the Trinity Knot. It’s a Celtic Irish symbol I’ve been drawn to before I ever had an inkling of family heritage tying back (see what I did there?) to the culture. Drawing this knot is difficult for the very reason that makes it so captivating: there is no beginning or end. There are only eternal curves. In other words: it’s Life as we’ll come to accept it. 

There’s also a Celtic conviction – at least according to a questionable Google search – that things of significance in this world come in threes.  I think of triangles and how I’ve been told my whole life they’re the strongest structure to build with – a fact that did not keep the balsa wood bridge I built in my high school architecture class from collapsing under an embarrassing low amount  of pressure. I think about how the best passing in soccer often occurs when players form an ever-shifting triangle wherever they are on the field, always allowing the teammate with the ball at least two quick options to go to. I think about my wife and our newly-2-year-old daughter and the unmistakable power of the firstborn. You start with two people. And then you make a third. And everything with that child is a series of firsts, the bond burnished through the experiences you survive and build upon. 

Recently, in the third and final test for my bilingual certification, I did an ASL (American Sign Language) interview. The process is deceptively simple: you chat with an interviewer over 5 questions and 20 minutes, using as much ASL grammar and structure as you comfortably can. But the hardest part of the test is everything before and after. Very few Deaf people sign in strict ASL; we’re the accumulation of all our experiences and exposures to language, especially English (or any other dominant speaking language). Our individual language style is one of survival, a way to say, “I got to this point in my life by signing just like this.” And yet the results are scored by someone not in the room, someone who reviews this recorded interview video that flattens your 3D conversation. You can’t help but feel like the score – one way or another – is some indictment of your own Deaf identity. 

I say this because as I was practicing for the test, thinking through signs I’d seen hundreds of times but didn’t quite feel comfortable with on my own, I ran into one unexpected roadblock: lists. When you’re describing a list of things in ASL – in the air, not through spoken words – you will use your non-dominant hand to keep track of them. To me, the easiest number to work with is 3. It feels sturdy and true. Like the triangles that build everything powerful and imposing around you. When you extend the list to four, the natural instinct is to raise the ring finger, which is awkward as hell. It doesn’t feel right. Unless you’re really flexible, that ring finger will be barely rising, like a deflating tube balloon, a shy digit eager to duck out of the exercise altogether. What you’re supposed to do is fold in the thumb and raise four fingers. But now your brain has to shuffle the list one finger over. And then if you decide to extend the list to 5, you reshuffle a finger over in the opposite direction, with your thumb becoming the top of the list.

At some point, it feels like 3 is where you should stop. 

(Sidebar: this led me, a childhood Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles megafan to wonder: just how would these four dudes say “I love you” in ASL? Just hold their hands up, all fingers extended? Squeeze two green balls between their two fingers? Would it mean that “hello” and “I love you” and “goodbye” are all the same sentiment and this is why they have commitment issues?)

Coming back to the Celtic conviction of threes: it can represent many things: birth, life, and death; earth, sea, and sky; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But there’s one particular triad that’s slapped me around in adulthood and parenthood alike: the past, present, and future. 

As a parent, there is no way to unhook the curves in the Trinity Knot of your life. Every decision you make about your child runs through all three time loops all at once. When you wonder just how many salty snacks is enough before Nabisco signs them to an endorsement deal. When you fret whether to rock them or let them cry it out. When you try to determine how much money to set in a college fund when you can’t even imagine what college will look like in this crazy world 16 years down the line. In each decision you will consider your past as a child, and as an adult you will consider the impact in the present moment. You will wonder, far more than you want to admit, if you’ve irreparably screwed up your child. All these three timelines will bleed into each other like someone placing a tissue paper collage over your brain, one overlapping layer at a time.

As an adult, you’re going to constantly be fidgeting with your identity in every idle and chaotic moment. You’re going to be rewriting your past, reframing every embarrassing high school moment (God, they were many) and decision you swerved away from making, trying to rewire everything so the person you are today makes a little bit more sense. And then you’re gonna look ahead, into the great unknown, and wonder just what is yet to come. This is all normal. This is all what makes life wonderful and difficult and interesting and unique. I love my animals, but I do not believe they have these trinity loops running through their heads. Perhaps that’s why you don’t see substance addiction and therapy in the Animal Kingdom. 

One day I will learn these handy knots. I’ll secure a few boats and assure the structure of some tents (especially so my family doesn’t assume I’m as clueless as I sometimes look). Perhaps I’ll even help my daughters build an especially invulnerable balsa wood bridge, vicariously living through their project, shaking my fist at the architecture gods and their impossible standards. But until then, I’ll be okay with stopping at 3. Three is more than enough. Three eternal loops is a life worth examining. And a life examined is one worth living.