Two Overlapping Circles: What the Vesica Piscis Taught Me About Standing Between Two Choices

Late October, Two Equally Good Options, and I Couldn't Choose Either

Last year the end of October brought me two things at once, which is the season's habit. One: an offer to take on a steady, well-paid project with people I like. Two: a clear opening to spend four months building something of my own, with no guaranteed income. Both were genuinely good. Neither was obviously right. For eleven days I did the thing I always do when I can't decide — I made lists, asked four friends, slept badly, and made no decision at all. The lists kept coming out even, which was the whole problem.

The way out wasn't a decision. It was a shape. I was sitting in a café with a pen and a napkin when I drew a circle, then another circle of the same size whose centre sat on the first circle's edge. Two overlapping circles, pointed almond in the middle. I'd seen it in a book months earlier and forgotten the name. That afternoon I looked it up: the vesica piscis.

Two Circles, One Narrow Middle

The construction is almost embarrassing in its simplicity. Draw a circle. Without changing the compass, place the point anywhere on that circle's edge and draw a second. The lens-shaped region where they cross is the vesica piscis — Latin for "bladder of the fish," which is far less poetic than the shape is. Its Italian name, mandorla, means almond, and medieval painters used exactly that almond form to frame holy figures, marking them as standing at the meeting of two worlds.

The proportions have kept mathematicians interested for a very long time: the height-to-width ratio is the square root of three, roughly 1.732 to 1. And the shape is generative in a way I didn't expect. Connect the two centres and one intersection point and you have an equilateral triangle. Keep going and you get the hexagon, then the Seed of Life, then the Flower of Life — the entire vocabulary of sacred geometry, so to speak, hatching out of one overlap. Gothic builders used these proportions for pointed arches and windows; the shape is quite literally load-bearing in stone.

Why This Shape Worked When My Lists Didn't

Here's what I understood on the second day of looking at my napkin. My lists assumed the answer had to be one circle or the other — the safe project or the risky one, with a compromise in between. The shape offered a different idea: the overlap is not a compromise. It's a third thing, made of both and identical to neither. Two complete circles meet and generate something that neither one contained. In the traditions that use this symbol, that's the whole teaching: difference creates, and the meeting place is a new form rather than a settlement.

That sounds abstract until you apply it. The two circles were "security" and "authorship," and the overlap turned out to be a specific, boring, real option I hadn't written on any list: take the project at three days a week and start the other thing slowly, in public, funded. Not a compromise — a genuinely third shape. I took it. The four months became seven, and the thing I built is now most of my working life.

Working With the Shape: What I Do

Practice 1: Draw It and Name the Circles

Pen, or two coins if you don't own a compass. Draw the overlap, then write one word in each circle — not the options, but what each one is for. Mine were "security" and "authorship." Almost always the words turn out not to be opposites, which is the first useful thing the exercise does. Then sit with the almond in the middle and let the third word arrive without forcing it.

Practice 2: Breathing Through the Almond

The shape works well as a breathing map. Inhale along the left circle's curve, hold briefly at the top point, exhale down the right, pause at the bottom point. Four or five rounds. The pause at each tip is where I notice something — not an answer, usually, but a change in how urgent the question feels. Contemplative traditions have used this form as a gateway image for a long time, and I think it's the symmetry: two equal sides, one narrow passage between them.

Practice 3: The Third-Thing Prompt

Once a season, when I'm stuck between two goods, I write one sentence: what wants to be born here that is neither option but requires both? I don't edit it for a page. It's produced some nonsense over the years and at least two of the best decisions I've made. The prompt only works when both options are genuinely good — for a good-versus-bad choice, just take the good one and skip the geometry.

Practice 4: Carrying the Shape

I'm wary of turning symbols into jewellery-shaped superstition, so I'll say plainly what this is: a reminder. The marquise-cut pendant I wear is the vesica shape — an almond lens, pointed at both ends — and when I catch it in a reflection my body remembers that a narrow middle can be a passage rather than a trap. In this tradition, ordered geometry is said to hold a stable field; I can't verify that. What I can verify is the reminder, which has redirected me more than once.

Back to the Café

Late October again, and I'm no longer waiting on that decision — but I've kept the napkin, taped inside a notebook, because the shape keeps being useful. Any two things that are both true and both mine: rest and ambition, the work I show and the work I don't, the version of me that wants company and the one that wants the door shut. The temptation is always to pick one and mourn the other. The vesica suggests something less tidy and more alive: stand in the overlap until the third thing shows its face. Some seasons nothing shows up, and I've learned to let those seasons be quiet without deciding anyway. But when it does arrive, it never looks like either circle, and it always fits.

Questions People Ask About This Shape

Is this a religious symbol?

It has religious history — the mandorla framing Christ and the Virgin in medieval iconography, the ichthys fish, the Chalice Well cover at Glastonbury — and it also appears in Pythagorean geometry and in much older art. I use it as a geometric form with a long symbolic memory, not as a devotional object. If it carries a meaning for you that I haven't mentioned, in my experience that meaning belongs in the practice.

How is this different from a Venn diagram?

Constructionally, the vesica is precise: each circle's centre lies exactly on the other's circumference, which fixes the proportion at the square root of three. A Venn diagram is any overlap. The precision is the point in the geometric tradition — the ratio is what lets the other figures be derived from it.

Which chakra does it relate to?

Some systems associate it with the sacral centre, because of its generative, womb-like reading, and others with the third eye, because the almond resembles an eye and is used as a gateway image in meditation. I've worked with it at both and never found the assignment to matter much — the shape itself does the work.

Do I need to own something with this shape?

No. I drew mine on a napkin with a ballpoint pen, and that napkin did the job. A pendant is a reminder for people who forget; a compass and paper is the practice.

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