A fun exercise that takes less than one minute: Take your current age in years, and draw the same number of circles on a sheet of paper, without lifting your pencil/pen. Then post your drawing with the hashtag #myageincircles
Here’s mine:
This would be fun to do every year on your birthday.
You could use this for a birthday card to give to someone.
The birthday card could be as simple as drawing this repeated circle. You don’t even need to mention the age of the person. The overlapping circles give you enough of an idea of how old someone is. Then write on the card, “Happy birthday! This represents how many times you have gone around the sun. Here’s to many more trips around the sun. Your fellow space traveler, [sign your name]“
Bonus points if you record a video of yourself drawing the circles, and send the video to the birthday person. Watching the circle get drawn over and over would give you a real sense of orbiting the sun a number of times. It would be really cool to capture the sound of the pencil rolling along the surface of the paper. Side-note: Does the earth make any sounds when it travels through space? I’m guessing not, because there isn’t any noise in space, right? Well, I like to imagine the earth makes the same sound that a pencil makes as it goes along paper. So there.
Why do I feel like my circles form a sort of black hole void?
My circles filled the entire piece of paper! 🙂 Thanks for the idea Matt!
Haha! I had to make sure to keep good count while I was spinning my pencil around on the paper for what seemed like a long time.
I would have to lift the pencil so I could keep count. Maybe if I start now I’ll be done by my birthday. Love the idea of making it a birthday card! Thanks the sentiment idea too
Yeah, it’s a little tricky keeping count while drawing continuous circles. The causes the circles to not perfectly overlap—which is kinda nice to see some of them sticking out. But the circles overlap just enough so people seeing it don’t know exactly how many circles there are. It’s a nice balance.
Oh, I had another idea with this as a birthday card… what was it… Something like… Gaaaa! I’m trying to remember as I type. It was one of those laying-in-bed thoughts. There is something where I would have a call-out pointing to the circle. But I don’t remember what the call-out said. It didn’t say anything about the years.
Maybe it was related to how many miles the person has traveled around the sun. I think that’s it.
Ok, Tom, I’m going to send you an early birthday card now. It’s actually going to be a card with your current mileage around the sun. Oh, I know what I’ll do. I’ll draw the circles with the correct number of years. But then it’s not your birthday yet, so I’ll stop the last circle a little more halfway through (because your half birthday was just a few weeks ago), but when I stop that last circle halfway through, I’ll continue the line off to the side, and then I’ll lift up my pencil. On top of that “fly-away” line, I’ll write the stat about how many miles you have traveled around the sun as of today. That’ll be fun.