Here's a riddle:

what is this image to you?

Find out after the jump.

 Have your answer? Got it? Good. 

For those that guessed 'a year,' CONGRATULATIONS! You get an extra 24 hours for 2011. Not a lot extra from the looks of this graph, no? 

Yes. This grid represents a year: the columns are the days in a month and the rows are the months in a year. Your eyes linger on this table, don't they. I always thought of time as linear, but when you visualize it in a 12by31 table, it provides a whole new perspective. 

How quick is it to cross one day off a year in this calendar? Barely a second. How often have you thought -- Wow, it's already insert-current-month-here. I've been guilty of the same crime. Time flies in heaps and bounds, more and more so as we grow older. Years feel like weeks; weeks feel like days. Before you know it -- your hours and seconds have passed you are left with no vestigial trace of limbs once limber and lithe, left nostalgic of a youth as distant as adulthood imagined by a child.

Hard to imagine 24 hours condensed into one tiny cell on this grid. So. How many grids do you think you have left?

Life is short. We hear this cliche too often. We roll our eyes too quickly. It has become so hackneyed that it becomes ignored.

What a travesty.