Special Edition: 2.22.22!
“The date 2/22/22, though striking, carries no inherent meaning beyond its function in our particular calendar. ”
Except for that it does.
Today is 2.22.22 or 22.2.22 if you prefer—either way, the pattern is apparent. We already had a 2.2.22 this month, but that was just the warm-up because 2.2.22 was a Wednesday.
Today’s 2.22.22 is a Tues-day. It’s the real thing.
Apophenia is a mental habit (a survival skill or a pathology) that enables us to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. All creatures use patterns to understand and survive the world—non-poisonous swallowtail caterpillars mimic patterns of poisonous monarch ones to avoid being eaten and birds use apophenia when they avoid black and yellow caterpillars altogether.
The higher the risk in not seeing the pattern, the more we are likely to see that pattern everywhere (see birds above). For example, if the grass on the savannah is moving, it could be the wind (innocuous pattern) or it could be a tiger (dangerous pattern). And since mistaking a tiger for the wind has dire consequences if we venture off for a walk on a breezy morning, our brains are likely to assign specific, predatory meaning to moving grass until we can determine otherwise.
Or we may just decide that all moving grass contains a tiger and remain in the hut.
How does this get us to 2.22.22?
According to an article in Scientific American, Professor Michael Shermer, author of Patternicity, states, “people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.” In other words, we give meaning to 2.22.22 because we know that other patterns—like waving grass—have proven meaningful, too, to and two.
And the fact that we have found significance in repeating patterns of numbers for thousands of years makes those patterns, um, meaningful.
An interesting life comes from making meaningful connections between unrelated things, and interesting people find meaningful patterns where others don’t. Poetry, a practice toward which I am particularly interested, cultivates and relies on apophenia in order to unstick the inherent meanings in words, situations, and images and fan them out to catch other meanings, like a net, like a web.
Tuesday, 2.22.22
five twos, 10, odd pairs of evens, factors to
1, the individual and the whole. One
sound standing still, resonating until it dissolves and is amplified—
a long line of echoes and an overstrike blackening
the date onto the day.
Take the time to tune in to 2.22.22 today. What keeps repeating? Where are pairs and partners asking for attention? What is coming toward you, on the wind, creating patterns in the space around you?
Probably not a tiger.
