“What is the significance of…”

“What does it mean when…”

Over the years, I’ve seen many questions that begin with each of those phrases. This is not surprising. It is a well established fact that many humans have an innate tendency to find significance, meaning, and even patterns where there actually are none. There’s even a term for this.

To give a more concrete example, I’d like to share something I posted on social media yesterday:

I’m reminded that a lot of people don’t realize that our calendar is entirely arbitrary. It’s useful, but arbitrary. So it makes it interesting to me when people try to find meaning in it. Things like “there are two blue moons this year! What does it mean?!” It means that an entirely arbitrary calendar lined up with the lunar cycles in a mildly peculiar way.

There’s nothing wrong with looking for significance or meaning, either. However, often there is neither until we imbue something with our own meaning and significance. This seems to be something some people don’t realize and maybe even be uncomfortable with. They seem to think that some external source — perhaps even some sort of authority — must declare that meaning and significance. Or maybe they’d prefer that such meaning and significance be an inherent property of the universe.

As someone who sees witchcraft as the act of creation (literally making us co-creators of the world we live in and are further building), I welcome the idea that we tend to imbue events and things with meaning and significance. It is essentially part of the creation process, where we imprint our own view of significance and meaning on the world around us, both as individuals and collectively. In fact, I’d say it’s an important part of defining and envisioning the kind of world we want to both create and live in.