Resolve to Live in Four Dimensions

Let 2026 be the year of "both/and" heroes.

Photo by Sapan Patel on Unsplash

We live in a world that keeps trying to flatten us. Political debates reduce to two sides. Moral questions become good vs. evil. Complex human beings get sorted into heroes and villains. But human life isn't one-dimensional. It's four-dimensional, sprawling across breadth and depth and height and time in ways that resist easy categorization.

While sorting kids' socks the other day (why so many socks???) I listened to an interview with Sister Helen Prejean of Dead Man Walking fame, and it reminded me that more than anything this coming year, we need heroes who refuse to be flattened; people who grapple with complexity and admit when they're wrong.

You Don’t Have to Choose

When Sister Prejean first accompanied Patrick Sonnier as his spiritual advisor on death row, she avoided the victims’ families. She was afraid of causing them more pain. She felt kind of like she’d chosen a side and the system seemed to demand it. Advocates for victims sat on one side of the room, family of the accused on the other.

She also recognized the messy and complex moral space in which she was moving. Sonnier was guilty at least of rape and facilitating—if not committing—two particularly brutal murders of innocent people. While Prejean focused on his innate dignity despite his crimes, she didn’t know how to bridge the gap between his dignity and his effects on his victims.

That changed when Lloyd LeBlanc, one of the victims’ fathers, approached her at the pardon board hearing. “You never came to talk to us,” he said. “Why didn’t you come see us?”

That sentence freed her from the one dimensional binary space she’d been lulled into occupying and back into the tangled four dimensional world of human life. The system had tricked her into accepting a false binary, assuming dignity and compassion were finite resources she had to allocate to one side or another, as though caring for a condemned man meant she couldn’t also care for the family destroyed by his crime.

After that hearing, she made it her practice to always reach out to victims’ families. They don’t always want to talk to her, and she respects that. But she always reaches out because she knows advocacy is a nonzero sum game.

That’s the kind of hero we need. And fortunately for us, there are lots of them.

Our Hero’s Hero

In that one gentle confrontation, Lloyd LeBlanc went from being an adversary to one of Sister Prejean’s heroes.

She calls him the real hero of Dead Man Walking.

After Patrick Sonnier was executed and his younger brother sentenced to life in prison, their mother Gladys faced ongoing harassment including vandalism, threats, and dead animals thrown on her doorstep. In addition to losing her two sons in one of the worst ways possible, she faced both public condemnation and personal guilt as the mother who raised murderers.

LeBlanc, a man with every reason to embrace his rage and view her as an enemy, showed up at her door with a basket of fruit. “You’re going through a tough time too,” he said. “I’m here for you.”

LeBlanc forgave Sonnier and went on to support Prejean’s death row ministry, but none of it was easy. False binaries are seductive precisely because they give us short-term comfort, belonging, and easy answers. As one write-up noted, LeBlanc struggled with forgiveness, with rejecting false binaries, and with his own faith throughout his life:

While his initial response to the brutal murder of his son, and the rape and murder of his son’s girlfriend, was forgiveness, he faced an ongoing struggle to live that forgiveness. He rose to speak at the murderer’s clemency hearing to urge that a death sentence be carried out. But shortly thereafter he went to confession. Though he tried to avoid doing so, he attended the execution. There his son’s killer, Patrick Sonnier, apologized to him and asked for his forgiveness. LeBlanc nodded in assent. Years after the execution, LeBlanc is providing financial support to Sr. Prejean’s ministry to death row prisoners, whom he calls ‘God’s children.’ He attends Eucharistic adoration weekly, and he is praying for the Sonnier family. He comforted Patrick Sonnier’s mother on her death bed.

Nothing about LeBlanc’s path was easy or straightforward. He grappled with unimaginable grief, questioned his decisions, realized he was wrong and righted those wrongs, and reached out again and again to people whose very existence made him remember the worst moments of his life.

He chose the harder path over and over again.

As Prejean describes LeBlanc’s heroism in choosing a nonzero sum world: “It is a path, not a single act. One’s commitment to it has to be renewed every day.”

The world saw LeBlanc and Mrs. Sonnier as enemies, but the truth was messier and more human. They were joined in the universal grief of losing children—lost in fundamentally different ways, one child the cause of the other’s loss. They were united by a deeply human tragedy, one that could have easily splintered them from the inside out.

When LeBlanc explained his decision to forgive, he told Sister Prejean: “I can’t afford to let this hate consume me.”

Binary Thinking Harms Our Humanity

LeBlanc’s recognition points to something we could all stand to remember in 2026. Binary thinking doesn’t just cause polarization and unhealthy politics. It actively harms us as individuals—making us worse decision-makers, less trustworthy partners, more fragile, more brittle, and less capable of love.

I talk a lot about polarization because it’s bad for our political communities. But it’s also bad for us as individual human beings. I’m a worse person when I’m engaged in binary zero sum thinking: less generous, less creative, less patient with complexity. Most people I know are too. That’s part of why so many of us try to escape politics altogether: not because we don’t care, but because we recognize what it costs us.

But this is just part of the messy and uncomfortable four dimensionality of human life: what unites us isn’t always beautiful. It’s often pain and suffering and horrific acts, death and grief and loneliness. Nothing about this is easy.

But it’s precisely because that’s what unites us that we need each other. And it’s precisely because of this shared vulnerability that false binaries are so dangerous. They separate us just when we need each other most. They convince us that safety lies in choosing sides, when often our actual survival—emotional, spiritual, relational—depends on refusing to.

Lloyd LeBlanc could have given in to false binaries about good vs. evil, hate vs. love, guilt vs. innocence. But he knew he would be worse off in the end. Not primarily because it’s morally wrong—though it often is—but because it robs us of our capacity to be fully alive in the world.

It makes us smaller when we need to be larger, rigid when we need to be flexible, and fragile when we need to be resilient.

Resolving to Live in Four Dimensions

So here’s what I’m thinking about and challenging you all to think about about as we head into the new year and craft our various goals and resolutions:

Find a hero. Someone who reminds you the world is still pretty great even when it’s dark. Someone who can admit when they’re wrong and change course. Someone who refuses easy binaries even when the system demands them. We need people to look up to more than ever. Your hero can look different from Lloyd LeBlanc or Sister Prejean. But thinking in terms of concrete, complex, and imperfect human beings helps us stay motivated. They operate as lights in the cave, guiding us out.

Reject a false binary. Identify where you’ve been tricked into thinking you have to choose a side. Where you’ve assumed that caring for one person means abandoning another. Where binary and zero sum thinking has made you more fragile, less capable of love. Are there false binaries that are undermining your own personal growth? Your relationships? Your political communities? How might you resist one dimensional thinking and move back into real four dimensional space?

In the end, we can’t afford to live in one dimension. We need each other too much.

I’ll be thinking about that in the days ahead. Not primarily about resolutions about productivity or self-improvement (though I’ll admit some of those will sneak in), but about how we interact with each other. About how we might become less brittle and more whole.

About heroes like Lloyd LeBlanc and Sister Prejean: complex, imperfect people who work hard every day to escape one dimensional and binary thinking while living and hopefully thriving in a beautiful but tragically messy four dimensional world.

Your Turn

I’d love to hear your thoughts! What false binaries are you rejecting this year? What one dimensional policy debates or personal rules are you ready to move beyond? What radically moderate heroes are you thinking about this year? Whose name can you stick on a Post-It next to your computer? Who should we all read more about and why? Let us know! And if you like what you read, please subscribe and share! Reader shares are the primary way I find new readers and they mean the world.