I write;I think;I know.

Ad Astra

"Do you not think it's odd," I asked my cat one afternoon, "that there's a repeating threeness underpinning our discussions."

"Certainly," said my cat, "I don't think it's odd." She jumped up on the sofa next to me with an air of satisfied happiness. "There's a connection and a reason." She began to lick her paw, "if you look at it the right way you'll begin see it won't be long now before the threads resolve and the point is made."

"Really," I said with mild exasperation.

"Really," asserted my cat.

"As a matter of fact," I admitted in a more conciliatory tone, "I have noticed that at times of stress my personality does fragment. There's a degree of uncertainty, but it does appear to factor out into three. It's especially noticeable in my writing."

"It's worse than that," said my cat, "the fragmentation goes a lot deeper and at such times you're effectively dumb even though you still retain the ability to speak. It's not until you've managed to disengage from the situation and you're able to begin coalescing that you regain the ability to express yourself. Stepping down to three is merely your way to draw benefit from the experience. To break the cycle and to heal yourself without returning to the dysfunctional patterns which lead to and exacerbated the original problem."

"What," I said with mild astonishment.

"Consider," said my cat, "it takes a rare degree of insight to detach from a singular view and accept that what is being said and how it is being said are not necessarily in alignment. It is in accepting such division is possible that you allow yourself to see beyond the now and begin to expose the fundamentals of another's thought."

"So in a sense," I ventured, "if one considers the spoken word, the meaning of the words and the emotive attitudes conveyed cannot be assumed to have a connection."

"Certainly," said my cat, "we've already been through this."

"There's also," I pondered, "the issue of sub-text.

"Precisely," said my cat, "as I said, the fundamentals of another's thought."

"Yet," I queried, "what's this got to do with my threeness thing."

"It's your fairness principle," said my cat. "You insist on applying patterns identified in others to yourself and patterns identified in yourself to others. It's only when you're confident that what you're saying applies to both parties that you are willing to express it."

"So what are you saying."

"That the pattern of three is pretty much universal," said my cat, "and you know it."

"And."

"And now you really should find a way to tell somebody."