How to Leap
I love a leap day. There are many reasons to love it — the way it flips February from even to odd and nudges Valentine’s Day out of its middle, how it comes around infrequently enough that people give it a bunch of innocent attention. Today you’ll read or hear many stories about people born on February 29 who are celebrating their “10th” birthday and not their 40th, as if this one day bunches up the ribbon of time.
I love leap day most of all because it’s so human. Minds like ours — strange mechanisms that can decouple thinking from the immediate present — have likely been obsessed with time since they first emerged. We plan, we reminisce, we worry — we create artificial joints in time and then set about carving it up accordingly.
Problem is, we’re not all that good at it. One astronomical or sidereal year (for us) lasts 365.25 days, which means that if we just let the years unfold by day by day, eventually our calendars would slip out of sync with the natural seasons. We therefore need to insert an extra day every four years (except, of course, for years evenly divisible by 100 but not 400) to keep our summer months in the summers.
Also so very human is how, though our minds love to be let off the leash of the present, we can’t help but come back to the body. The “leap” in “leap year” and “leap day” comes from how the same numerical date — March 1, say — falls on a Wednesday one year and Thursday the next, except in years like this one when we need March 1 to “leap” over a Thursday to a Friday to keep the Gregorian calendar neat. Leaping is a thing bodies do, though, but so is skipping or passing over. So funny how we make sense of thought and time, two of the most abstract things, with launching ourselves into the air, a thing alive in the world.
Wonderful and timely for me. Well done!