I've been working on curriculum development, (which in my case means I've been writing my own curriculum from the ground up,) and I found myself debating about whether or not I should make some sort of physical representations of all the various components that I'm trying to order and arrange. It seemed to be a logical idea, so that I could see how they would all fit into the time that I have in a given term. Ultimately I opted not to add the extra step for myself today, but rather just go with a mental model. As I was imagining the space of the year and what might need to be where, I realized that I actually conceive of a year in terms of a physical space. ...Well that's not exactly true because I didn't realize that I conceive of a year as a physical space, (to the best of my recollection I've always conceived of a year as a physical space); actually I supposed what I realized, more exactly, was that while I conceive of a year as a physical space, (which to me seems the most incredibly obvious way to think of it,) it is likely that not everyone else does. In fact what suddenly seems so striking is that space of a year as I see it may not be what everyone sees/experiences when they think about a year.

At this point my guess is that most people reading this fall into one of two camps: The first camp fully expects me to go on to describe the physical/cognitive space that I have for a year, while the second camp wants me to go on to discuss how we think of things or perhaps the concept of cognitive models. Perhaps there may be a third group as well who simply don't care, (though I doubt they are still reading) or perhaps are just plodding ahead not anticipating where this train of thought maybe headed. In the interest of full disclosure when I started writing I had intended simply to describe the way in which I thought about a year as a space, however as I came to it I realized that that was the obvious choice, the one where I would have expected me to go if I were the reader. So I stepped back from it and thought maybe this would be better written as a laypersons assessment of how we build our own internal cognitive models, but that to me seems to be moving away from the thing that was most interesting about my realization in the first place. What was really striking was that moment where I saw something that to me is ordinary and commonplace as new and unfamiliar.

One also shouldn't discount the power of distraction as a creative strategy...