I celebrated a 12 year old’s 3rd birthday in junior high.
It was a slumber party on February 29th.
She was so excited. Apparently she hadn’t gotten over the indignation of having her real birthday absent from most calendars yet. This was a big deal, and her mom went all out. I thought it was ridiculously cool, and though we went to different high schools and drifted apart, I can’t help but imagine where she is every leap year. I think today is her 10th birthday.
Leap Day, our bonus that comes from 3 years of banked hours arrived this morning: an extra day.
I wanted to write about, how will you spend it? Do something special. Treat yourself or take care of nagging tasks that seem to pile up and weigh you down. Take advantage.
But it’s Monday.
Work, school, life. These 24 hours are already spoken for, and the idea of an extra day is nothing more than a smile when you catch the date. Depending on how you get paid, it might be a few extra dollars in the grand tally, or a few extra hours of unpaid work.
Yikes, that’s depressing.
On a practical level, this bonus day just might be a wash, so let’s look deeper and higher. Let’s consider why we have this extra day. Let’s consider our place in the universe. We are smaller than ants, and maybe even dust. We live on this wild blue planet, that’s mostly liquid and gas. It is always spinning around on its axis and it hurtles in an ellipse around a medium star that is actually a fireball bigger than our imaginations can comprehend.
We, specks of dust, have worked diligently to come up with this knowledge and to figure out how to mark time. Still, just like second-grade division we couldn’t complete the equation, so we were left with a remainder. The best we could come up with is to take those remainders and add them together every four years for an extra day. We have so much to learn. We are still so little.
And if we are that small, possible smaller than dust, imagine how infinitesimal our biggest problems are.
Happy Leap Day!
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