What’s the Shape of Your Year?

Can you see it?

I used to think that everyone thought of the months of the calendar year the same way. To me it has always been “obvious” that they were arranged in a circle — 12 hours, 12 months. Furthermore, we go through them clockwise, “of course”. The light is above and the dark is below, which for me living in the northern hemisphere puts sunny July at the top and the winter solstice at the bottom. The circle is a bit distorted, with more months crowded on the left — January, February, March, April, May, June — and fewer on the right — August, September, October, November — which again is “obvious” to me because it’s a long, slow climb out of winter to summer and a faster “fall” back into winter. I don’t just “see” the months in that distorted circle, I can sort of “feel” where the single “hand” of the clock is on the circle. Right now, as I’m editing this on March 1, it feels about twenty minutes to noon, or about at my left shoulder.

When I casually mentioned the shape of my year to a class, years ago, the bafflement that most of the class exhibited made me aware for the first time that the shape of my year was idiosyncratic. Since then, as I have done an informal sampling of people by asking them, I have discovered that most people don’t report “seeing” a shape to their calendar year at all, but a significant minority of us do. Furthermore, the shapes…