In what way do you visualize a calendar year?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The way a year is typically laid out in a calendar is on a 4 x 3 (or 3 x 4) grid, with
January top left, December lower right. But for some odd reason that’s not how
I’ve visualized it. Instead, ever since I can remember, I’ve seen it as a circle (ellipse
really), with December at the bottom, March on the right, June at the top, Sept. on
the left, so that the year goes counter-clockwise, oblong ends of the ellipse at March
and Sept. It would seem that clocks might be an inspiration, but why do I go counter-
clockwise? Maybe it is a neo-pagan past life memory thing, like Stonehenge. If I
need to calculate how many months before say a vacation, I just easily count them
off in my head.

Anyway, how do you visualize a year? Maybe you don’t visualize it at all and just
count them off as numbers (1-12)? I’m probably the only person who looks at it
that way. A perfect MPSIMS thread I guess…

2

In day lengths, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.

3

Like a reverse bell curve, because we start and end the year in summer here, so we go from high to low (July) and swing back up to high.

4

Pardon the length of this reply, but you’ve hit a favorite topic (one of several, fwiw) of mine.

My boss (several bosses ago – back when I was actually working) had this bizarre object on his credenza that he said he got somewhere odd. I don’t remember if it was a gift, an heirloom, something he found at an antique shop or a yard sale, or what. Doesn’t really matter except he was pretty sure it was several hundred years old.

It was maybe three feet tall and looked a little like a paint stirrer in that it had a sort of handle on one end that was rounded, but the majority of its length, the bottom 7/8 or so, was a 7-sided solid. From a distance it looked like a tall cylinder, but up close you could see it was this whatever you call a 7-sided solid, heptagonal?

This stick was attached to a disk that was maybe 4-5" in diameter, so that it sat upright on the credenza. At the bottom of the stick, resting on the disk was a removable disklike object that was cut to fit the seven-sided stick. It had a seven-sided cutout in its center. Like a washer.

The long stick was marked off in a spiraling array of days of the year, starting with March at the top and going through the months until you got to February 29 at the bottom. The removable disk had seven sections (like an orange or grapefruit) marked with the days of the week.

Once a year, on Feb 28 or 29, you would take the removable disk off, give it a 1/7 turn and set it back down on the stick. That gave you the new year’s calendar. Pretty damn slick, I’d say!

It took my knowledge of how calendar reforms had been instituted in Colonial American (as well as European) times for me to be able to explain to him that it used to be that March was the first month of the year, making September, October, November and December the actual 7th-10th months. Before Julius Caesar renamed July, that month had been Quintilis (sp?) or 5th.

But the main beauty of this stick’s layout was that you didn’t have to mess with the weirdness of February right in the middle of things. Being at the bottom, you dealt with the 28 or 29 days thing just when it came time to start the “new year.” You would be trusted to know if the year you were leaving was a Leap Year or not.

Anyway, after all that, my view of the calendar has been that stick ever since I first laid eyes on it.

5

I visualise time as a long, neat row of cubes with slightly rounded corners and edges - like Mah-jongg tiles. They run along a line starting somewhere behind me and to the left, extending past my left elbow and away into the infinite distance. A calendar year is just a year-long set of adjacent tiles.

6

Amazing.

I have always seen the year as an ellipse in my head. In my ellipse though January is at the top and August is at the bottom. Mine runs counter-clockwise too. Right now I see the hour hand between the 10:00 and 11:00 o’clock position.

In my ellipse the sun is also present in the centre, but it’s closer to the bottom of the ellipse, so that as the hand approaches the bottom it starts to get warmer.

7

My perception of the passage of a year is pretty dominated by sunlight. So I think of where we are with respect to the solstices and equinoxes.

I don’t usually think of a “year” in the abstract as any specific 12-month period - say Jan 1-Dec 31, but instead tend to think of the twelve month periods with respect to the current date (if that makes any sense to you).

8

I visualize a year as 12 calendar pages, lined up vertically with January at the top and December at the bottom.

Mr. S often asks me to draw him my visualization of the entire span of time; it’s a linear deal with lots of right angles at significant dates: the BC/AD divide, 1000, 1900, 1970 (I was born in 1967), slight kink at 1980, 1990, and 2000. It’s changed a bit as the years pass, but the basics are the same.

9

Nope, not at all. I picture it pretty much the same way. I think for me it comes from the school year so summer’s on top, September starts the new school year on the upper left part of the ellipse, December’s at the bottom, and things start to swing up again as you start a new calendar year and head towards summer vacation again.

It’s been a long time since I was in school, but this view of the year has stuck with me. Besides, it makes sense as a daylight-related view of the year. There’s the most sunlight at the top of the ellipse, the least at the bottom, and equal amounts on the sides. I don’t know why it’s an ellipse and not a circle though.

10

My year starts March 1, which is the first day of spring. Each season lasts three months, and the year ends on February 28 (February 29 in leap years)

11

Time is a fuzzy cloud in my mind. I have to force myself to deal with the concept. I certainly don’t visualize it in any way, shape, or form.

12

Fascinating. Jung probably would have a field day with this-collective unconscious
and all. Perhaps there’s some sort of “cyclical” vs. “linear” thing going on here-I
know philosophically I definitely lean towards the cyclical view of things, where
applicable.

13

I haven’t the vaguest idea why, but I picture it sortof like a 3-dimensional version of this:


January  February  March  April  May
                                 June
                                 July
                                 August
                                 September
                                 October
                                 November
                                 December

where the months of January through May kindof go off into the far distance, and you’re almost viewing June through December a little bit sideways, although it must somehow curve a little more than that, because December and January are much closer to each other in my mind than this representation would make you think. Except, of course, nothing about it looks curvy in my mind, it’s just that by the time I’m picturing December, even though it’s directly below November, January only seems to be a short “jump” up and to the left a little. I don’t know, it’s odd and inexplicable.

14

It’s boring I suppose, but I see it as just a horizontal line with the months listed. As follows:

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Now I’m jealous of you people who think in curves, right angles, and candlesticks.

15

What a cool thread. I’ve never talked to anyone about it, so I had no idea other people pictured the year in unusual ways, but yeah, me too.

I picture the year as one cycle of a continuous sine wave, but off-center a little. January is on the left, a little below center, then going downward to March, then up to September, and then down again to December. I’ve always pictured it that way. I’d try to diagram it, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t come out right on everyone else’s screen.

16

And this thing sounds supercool. Anybody know what it was?

17

Would this be the appropriate place to point out that the calendar on the wall of my office still says December
.
.
.

2005! :wink:

18

Me neither. I’m surprised that other people do visualize something.

19

Hmmmm…d’ya THINK?
I picture calendars like the old time movies…pages flying off a pad, one day at a time.

My son used to measure time in “sleeps.”

Three more sleeps til Santa comes!

20

I’m another boring, calendar is just a straight line of months, kind of guy. Though I guess i"m odd in that September is always the leftmost month, and August of the next year is on the right (that’s what year and years of American schools does to a person. To me, things “started” in September."