The Unseen Third

On how contradiction, when held rather than fought, gives rise to something new

Author’s Note

This essay is something I’ve been contemplating for a while — part observation, part wondering aloud. It isn’t meant to take a political position but to explore, philosophically, what becomes possible when two opposing truths are held long enough for something new to take shape between them.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how often we get caught staring at the obvious sides of things — our opinions, our certainties, our “ships” — and miss the deeper pattern rising beneath them. In that sense, this piece became a quiet practice in mindfulness: holding the tension between opposites without rushing to fix or flatten them, simply noticing what begins to form in the space between.

It’s my attempt to name that unseen space — what I’ve started calling the third thing. I’d welcome your thoughts, interpretations, and experiences around this idea — not as debate, but as conversation. What have you noticed that emerges when you hold two contradictions long enough for something unexpected to appear?

“Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.” — Carl Jung

Submarine

In junior high, there was a ridiculous prank we used to play. One kid would tell another to cup their hands in front of their face and “watch for two ships.” The prankster would then sail their opposing index fingers toward each other — two little ships approaching from opposite sides. And just when the ships met, the unsuspecting kid would hear, “Watch out for the submarine!” — followed by a swift knee to the crotch.

Cruel? Sure. But it works as a metaphor. We’re often so focused on the two ships — the expected options, the obvious poles — that we miss what’s unseen. Sometimes the “submarine” shocks us awake; sometimes it’s simply the deeper pattern, the third presence rising from below, quietly changing how we see the whole scene.

The unseen third isn’t always destructive; it’s often creative. It might be the laughter that dissolves conflict, the empathy that grows from misunderstanding, or the art that emerges from pain — the subtle “they” that completes what the two alone could never make whole.

Contradictions

Each of us is a small universe of contradictions.
We wake wanting both adventure and safety — closeness and solitude — faith and doubt. We love deeply and guard fiercely. We expand, then retreat. We speak, then long for silence.

In Living Between Contradictions, I wrote that wholeness isn’t about choosing sides but learning to breathe in the space between them. That’s where growth happens — in the compost heap of transformation, where the old breaks down and the new begins to root.

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” — Walt Whitman

When we try to erase our contradictions, we flatten ourselves. When we learn to hold them, something unseen begins to form — a quiet synthesis we didn’t expect.

For much of my life, I believed harmony meant agreement — that to be whole I had to smooth over my rough edges, make all the parts of me behave. But life kept disagreeing.

When my partner David’s parents died within three days of each other, I felt both grief and awe. The experience was heartbreaking and strangely beautiful — an ending and a symmetry. Holding both at once was uncomfortable, but clarifying. It reminded me that life’s most meaningful moments are rarely pure. They’re mixtures — of sorrow and grace, fear and tenderness.

That’s the paradox at the heart of being human. Between any two forces — love and loss, faith and doubt, beauty and decay — something unexpected is always waiting to surface. Like that submarine from long ago, it catches us off guard. Only this time, it’s not here to hurt us but to wake us — to widen the frame until something more whole comes into view.

My friend Randy and I sometimes talk about this on our weekly philosophical walks. One morning, he described the ancient Judaic symbol of the triangle — a visual metaphor for how wholeness emerges. The two base points represent opposing truths, and the apex above them symbolizes the third element that resolves, transcends, and completes the whole. It isn’t a compromise but a new dimension — something that exists because of the tension below.

That image has stayed with me. It’s a reminder that opposites aren’t meant to cancel each other out but to lift something unseen into being — the higher point of understanding that can’t exist without the struggle beneath it.

Learning

After high school, I went through my own version of that awakening. I entered Purdue’s engineering program — structured, technical, and demanding — only to realize that my curiosity leaned toward something less precise. My second year, I swung to the opposite extreme, enrolling in interior and graphic design classes tucked away in old army barracks at the edge of campus.

I’d gone from one of the university’s most rigorous programs to perhaps its least conventional. And yet, both spoke to different sides of me — the analytical and the intuitive, the structured and the expressive. My third year, I found myself in architecture school at the University of Cincinnati, where the two finally met. Architecture was both art and science, order and emotion — a middle ground that made sense of my earlier contradictions.

It wasn’t an either/or decision but a slow recognition that what I was searching for had been forming between the two all along — something I could only perceive once I stepped back far enough to see the whole.

Macro

We experience the same pattern collectively. As a nation, we’ve long been caught between ideals that define and oppose each other — freedom and control, individualism and community, progress and preservation. Every generation replays the same push and pull, sometimes violently, sometimes creatively.

In Anatomy of Division, I wrote that we often seal each other into boxes — hero or villain, patriot or traitor, red or blue — without seeing the fuller constellation of traits that make us human. But what if we paused before sorting so quickly? What if, instead of looking for who’s right or wrong, we widened our gaze to see what’s emerging between us — the shared story still taking shape beneath the noise?

During the Great Depression, America was split between two opposing instincts — rugged individualism and collective responsibility. The country’s mythic self-image of self-reliance collided with the harsh truth that millions could not survive alone. Out of that tension, the New Deal emerged as a kind of national “third thing” — not pure capitalism, not socialism, but an experiment in shared stability.

It was the moment when government became both safety net and catalyst, when public works turned despair into employment and art into purpose. Bridges, parks, murals, and social systems rose from the rubble — not as monuments to one ideology, but as a living synthesis of both. In that way, the New Deal wasn’t just an economic recovery plan; it was a symbolic reconstruction of the American psyche — a reminder that wholeness often comes when we hold freedom and care in the same frame.

Each generation faces its own reckoning with this pattern — between self-reliance and shared care, between the myth of the lone hero and the reality of interdependence.

I’ve seen this in smaller ways, too — when two clients disagree on how to remodel a home. One wants light and glass; the other, warmth and wood. They argue until the design itself suggests a third way neither imagined — a home of transparency and shelter, reflection and refuge. The best rooms, I’ve learned, come from both.

Maybe that’s what citizenship asks of us now: to stay in the tension long enough for something new to appear — a synthesis capable of holding more than one truth at a time. Because too often, we’re staring at the two ships and missing the deeper current rising beneath them.

We feel this same tension in our personal identities, too. So many of us wrestle with the need to define ourselves as left or right, right or wrong, man or woman, single or partnered — as if clarity only counts when it fits within the lines. But there’s an entire spectrum of creative ways to live between those poles, ways of being that hold complexity instead of choosing a side. The in-between isn’t indecision; it’s its own kind of truth — a place where authenticity often hides, waiting for us to loosen our grip on definition long enough to let something more fluid emerge.

Reflection

I wish I could say I always see the unseen third. I don’t.
More often than I’d like, I catch myself narrowing my view — dividing things into what feels right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or broken. The mind loves clear edges; it wants the world to sort neatly into sides. But life rarely cooperates.

When someone acts in a way that feels hurtful or unjust, I can feel that reflex to define them — to make sense of the discomfort by naming a villain. Yet when I pause, I almost always glimpse more: the fear behind the anger, the tenderness beneath the defense, the part of me that mirrors what I resist.

That doesn’t excuse the harm — harm still needs to be named, addressed, and healed. But recognizing the fuller picture reminds me that even painful acts arise from a tangle of unmet needs, beliefs, and histories. Seeing that complexity doesn’t erase accountability; it expands it.

That’s the deeper work of awareness: to notice how easily we collapse reality into either/or, and to stretch our vision wide enough to sense what’s forming in between. The unseen third, I’m learning, isn’t just “out there” between opposing sides — it’s within me, surfacing whenever I soften my need for certainty and let paradox breathe.

Seeing

We live in a time that rewards reaction — quick takes, clean sides, instant certainty. But life doesn’t unfold that way. Most truths arrive slowly, through friction and discomfort.

The unseen third asks something quieter of us: to hold the tension without rushing to resolve it. To listen for what’s forming in the middle. To sense the “they” or “it” that’s missing from our narrow focus — the possibility that becomes visible only when we stop defending our view long enough to see beyond it.

When I’m photographing cityscapes, I’m always drawn to where surfaces meet — metal against moss, brick against reflection. That’s where the story lives: in the seam between elements that shouldn’t belong together but somehow do. Sometimes I wonder if that “in-between” already exists — an unseen layer of connection we stumble into — or if it’s created by their meeting, a new pattern born of contrast and proximity.

Either way, the edge becomes a kind of teacher, showing how difference, when held closely, can give rise to something entirely new.

Maybe that’s the invitation — to widen our vision, to stay present at the edges where things don’t yet make sense, and to notice what’s quietly forming there. The unseen third often rises in those uncertain spaces — between ideas, between people, between the parts of ourselves we’re still learning to hold.

That’s where transformation begins — in art, in love, in design, in the ongoing experiment of being human.
Maybe that’s the unseen third itself — not a thing to find, but a way of seeing.