I was unimpressed while looking over my depleted list of column ideas, and I felt like I needed a sign. Then it hit me. Needing a sign was my sign.

Think about how that sort of thing works. I was searching for some answer and then, as if I understood a secret design to the world around me, my mind found one.

We do variations of this all the time. Whenever my dog winks at me I think it’s a sign that something dramatic is about to happen.

It’s called apophenia, the formation of unmotivated mental connections that makes us attach significance to insignificant things. It’s our natural tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.

I heard a story from a girl who only knew her soon-to-be husband for five weeks when they had their first Christmas together. As spoof gifts, they ended up getting each other the same Spongebob coloring book. We can’t help but think that was “totally a sign,” and now they’re happily married.

Oddly enough, these signs are useful for us because we often take them as cosmic messages telling us to understand or do something. Whether or not they are naturally meaningless, we attach artificial meaning to them, and that becomes actual meaning.

Personally, I wish I could comprehend my own example that happened last week regarding my graduate school decision between two places over 2,000 miles apart.

I was walking home when someone passed me on the sidewalk wearing a T-shirt of one of the schools, and right as we crossed paths he tripped on the uneven pavement and lurched toward me. No less than an hour later I was sitting in my apartment watching “Jeopardy!” when one contestant mentioned having graduated from the exact program of my other option.

These things could have happened to me a million times before I had a decision to make, but now that it was relevant, I noticed them, and they meant something.

Look, anything can become a sign if we frame it right. You can take this next offer as a sign if you want to, and I promise every bit of it is true.

The first Marquette student that tweets or emails me saying “I want $5” will get $5 from me, no strings attached. The only catch is that I can’t already know you, because that wouldn’t be fair. We’ll meet up at the AMU, and you’ll take my money. I might wear a trench coat for good measure.

But what’s the real answer? Are signs external messages given to us by an exterior agent or force? Or are they just coincidences within a pattern we’ve mentally constructed?

If they are external, then we can take them as providential messages from God. If they are entirely non-supernatural, then they would just be recognizable synchronisms which we naively believe to be significant.

To me, since these signs make a difference at least to our degree of understanding, I think they’re significant with or without proper justification anyway. They help us understand ourselves because our interpretations reveal what we want through what we want things to mean. Whether divine or fabricated, we use them to make ourselves more comfortable in the surrounding world.

I personally believe God may have a lot to do with it, and the cat and mouse game we play when trying to decipher signs from God versus signs from our silly selves is what makes us interestingly capricious in thought. It’s an area where we let faith consistently overpower logic, and I think that’s pretty cool.

Still, even if we knew for sure where signs come from, things wouldn’t be so mysterious and fun. But seriously, don’t ever be foolish enough to think you should get engaged because your 267th turn in Draw Something had the word “baby” or anything.