Our lives follow well-established cyclical patterns, and would be disturbingly chaotic if they didn't.  We observe birthdays and anniversaries - our own, and those of our friends and business associates - pay bills every month, pay taxes every April, vacation in August, vote in November, and drink champagne on New Year's Eve.  These are personal cycles.  Cultural cycles, and the cycles of the natural world, also affect us deeply.  It is useful to know, for example, what time of year your dog will go into heat, or what month the season opener National League hockey game will be played, or when the price of Alaskan king crab will come down.  Cyclical experiences provide the order in our lives.

"The Circle of Life" will exploit the "new functionality" of multimedia to assist the user in tracking, and cross-correlating, the patterns of personal, social, and business activities, with recurring cultural and natural events.  It will make the many cycles of life more comprehensible, while enriching the user's awareness and appreciation of culture, and of nature.

At its core, the program will consist of an extensive set of lavishly illustrated, personalized, time-line style calendars.  Each calendar will track one aspect of the user's life, among those which are governed by cycles.  The calendars may be viewed individually, or in conjunction with a selection of others, so that the user may correlate the events each depicts.  This capability, along with some basic data-handling, and date arithmetic features, will make "The Circle of Life" an exceptionally useful tool, and create an experience for the user which would be impossible to duplicate in any other medium. 

 The program will feature:

• an illustrated flower calendar.
• astrophysical, and climatological calendars.
• calendars of animal, bird, and fish activities. 
• sports and arts calendars.
• a personal business calendar.
• seasonal foods calendars.
• a gardener's calendar. 
• corporate and academic calendars.
• a menstruation/fertility calendar.
• a world cultural calendar.
• a community events calendar. 

"The Circle of Life" will be designed to be personalized.  The user will be able to adjust, update, or add items with ease to any of the calendar/time-lines.  The user may set, or re-set, the period between recurrences of an event, or adjust the starting point, for any recurring event.  The user may also set "alarms" to give advance warning of any upcoming event.  In addition, the program will provide blank templates for entirely individualized, user-defined calendars.  Any item entered once will be tracked forever.  The program will calculate birthday ages, and anniversary years, automatically.  With "The Circle of Life" you will never again forget how long your friends have been married, or how old their children are.

For added functionality, the program may also be used to log events as they occur, allowing the user to keep track, for example, of their consistency in a work-out schedule, or their frequency of sleepless nights.  It will also allow the user to note when events anticipated by the calendars actually occur, making possible observations such as, "It's been four years since the butterflies came out this early."  This aspect of the program is game-like, and will make it an excellent teaching tool, for children or adults, whether in the classroom or at home. 

The "Circle of Life" will assist the user in integrating the many cycles of their lives.  And the beauty of the illustrations will make the program a delight to experience.