In college I took a directed seminar called Visual Approaches to Legal Thought, which asked us to do a lot of general exercises in visualization before conquering the legal part.  I remember one of them being the task of sketching out my mind’s depiction of time or a calendar.  

That sketch is long dead in a notebook somewhere, but it looks a lot like this image.  My vision of a year is a parade of seasonal scenes on a donut-shaped ring, that progresses counter-clockwise through a sphere that represents our planet, or my ‘world.’  Units of time aren’t cleanly demarcated — moments or days are a series of unidentified stopping points on a circuitous path that provide a constantly changing perspective of the year.  The tilt of the globe and an invisible z-axis provide occasional elevated vantage points, or moments of clarity, for seeing across the year.  

And so the passage of time, for me, often feels like winding my way around a planetary racetrack, the immediacy of tasks at the lefthand rail and outer space and abstraction flung out on my right.

[Image is Homer’s concept of the cosmos from the ever impressive Strange Maps.]