Special date

Today is 07/07/07. All sevens.

The number has earned its mythology across enough cultures that its appearance on a calendar date carries a low-grade collective electricity. Seven days in a week, seven notes in a diatonic scale, seven deadly sins, seven wonders—the number shows up in so many symbolic systems that its recurrence feels meaningful even when you know it is not.

In several religious and philosophical traditions, seven is associated with completeness and good fortune. Whether that is pattern recognition from a species that evolved to find patterns, or something genuinely structural about how we organize knowledge, is an interesting question to leave unanswered.

What is certain is that 07/07/07 happened exactly once. The convergence of calendar date, month, and year into a single repeated digit will not recur in most people’s lifetimes in quite this form. There is something worth noticing in a moment that is purely temporal—no achievement, no milestone, just the date being what it is.

If that noticing brings some good luck to the blog, excellent. If not, it was still worth the thirty seconds of attention.

Some things are worth marking simply because the calendar made them available to mark.