NynLyf
The story of 3 and 9
Every civilization that tried to describe a whole life kept landing on the same two numbers.
NynLyf has nine tiles and a list of three. That was not a design trend. It is one of the oldest ideas people have had about how to hold a life in your head. Here is where it comes from, and why it still works.
Nine means all of it
Egypt
Egyptians wrote "many" with three strokes. Three was how you said plural. So nine, three threes, was the plural of plurals. It meant everything. The nine gods of Heliopolis, called the Ennead, stood for the whole of creation. When Egyptians wanted to say "every enemy we have," they drew nine bows.
Three strokes meant "many." Three threes meant everything. That is the whole board.
The cat is in the story too. In the Book of the Dead, the sun god Ra takes the form of the Great Cat at Heliopolis, the city of the nine, and defeats the serpent of chaos every night so the sun can come up. Then the sun is born again at dawn. Every day is a new life.
Ra became the Great Cat to fight the dark. His descendant naps on whatever you have been ignoring.
China
The Lo Shu square is a three by three grid holding the numbers one through nine. Every row, column, and diagonal adds to fifteen. Feng shui lays that grid over a home as the bagua, a map of nine life areas: wealth, reputation, love, family, health, creativity, knowledge, career, and helpers. People have been looking at life as nine squares for a very long time. Nine was also the emperor's number, because the word for nine sounds like the word for long-lasting.
The Lo Shu square on the nine tiles. Every row, column, and diagonal adds to fifteen. Nothing is off balance.
The bagua's nine life areas laid over ours. Different words, same nine squares, about two thousand years apart.
Greece and the North
The Greeks had nine Muses, one for every art a person could practice. The Norse world tree held nine worlds, and Odin hung on it for nine nights to earn wisdom.
Nine Muses. Nine worlds on the tree. Nine keeps showing up wherever people count everything.
Three means complete
Pythagoras
The Pythagoreans called three the first complete number, because it is the first with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Aristotle passed it along: the whole, and everything in it, is defined by three.
The first number with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Also the shape of a day in NynLyf.
Rome
Omne trium perfectum.
Everything that comes in threes is complete.
The Hebrew tradition
"A threefold cord is not quickly broken," says Ecclesiastes. In Jewish law, something done three times becomes established. Once is an event. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is real.
Three cords, three strands each. Who you are, who you're with, what you stand on.
Everywhere else
Three wishes. Three acts. Three little pigs. Faiths from India to Ireland arranged the divine in threes. Every storyteller, preacher, and comedian learns the same rule: say three things, because people remember three things.
The math agrees
Nine is three times three. Multiply nine by anything, add up the digits of the answer, and you land back on nine. 9 × 7 is 63, and 6 + 3 is 9. 9 × 58 is 522, and 5 + 2 + 2 is 9. It always comes home.
Multiply nine by anything and the digits of the answer add back up to nine. It always comes home.
Why it still works
Modern memory research says a person can hold about three to five things in mind at once. Not ten. Not a project board with forty cards. That is why a to-do list of thirty items makes you feel worse and a list of three gets done.
Three to five things at once. That is the whole reason the 3 sits at the top of your screen.
And nine is about as many areas as a life really has. We tested it on a monk, a nineteen-year-old, and a widow. All three have all nine. Nobody needs a tenth.
Three rows of three. Who you are, who you're with, and what you stand on. The colors are old too: malachite, lapis, amethyst, carnelian, gold, turquoise. The stones Egyptians buried with the people they loved.
Meet Nyn
Nyn. Egyptian. Black. Nine lives, currently on one of them.
Named for Nun, the dark water the first nine gods rose out of. Also because it sounds like nine.
Descended from the Great Cat of Heliopolis, who fought chaos every night so the sun could come up. Nyn mostly naps.
Nyn will never remind you of anything. Nyn will never count your streak. If you ignore part of your life for a week, Nyn will go lie down on it. That's all. Cats sit on what you're not looking at.
For three he plays, for three he strays, and for the last three he stays.
The bad luck was always a rumor.
Read the NynLyf guides: the nine areas of life, the Wheel of Life, the Lo Shu square, and a free one-page printable.