Why isn’t Leap Day a bigger deal?

Here we have a day so special that it not only has its own date, that date is literally created to make room on the calendar for it. Sure we can get into a chicken-and-egg debate about whether the date exists because we had to make room on the calendar – but the fact remains we have this special day that comes around once every four years and it is barely acknowledged.

We get an extra day! How many films, how many novels, how many biographies feature a heart-breaking character who only asks for one – just one more day?

And yet, what food is associated with this ultimate moveable feast? Are there provincial traditions to symbolize the celestial sleight of hand that is Feb. 29? Are there folktales about why the shortest month is sometimes a bit longer but the longest ones are never any shorter?

Why am I writing about Leap Day? It’s so last week, you may say.

Well then, I have a question for you – 67 days ago many of us made a series of resolutions; things we were going to change in the New Year. How’s that going? The year isn’t so new anymore – we’re practically into the second quarter already.

What if we had four years to accomplish our resolutions? With such a difference in scale we could change our assumptions about what it is possible to change. Rather than resolve to change things in our lives, we could resolve to change how we live.

Let’s make Leap Day Resolutions.

There’s no reason to rush. Just because the actual day was last week doesn’t have to mean we missed our chance. Even if it took us a year to develop our Leap Day resolutions, we’d be in the same boat as if we made our New Year’s resolutions today.

Four years is a nice interval. We measure a lot of things in blocks of four years: high school, college (ideally) and presidential administrations come to mind. It’s enough time to get big things accomplished but small enough to get your head around. We could get two such sets of resolutions accomplished between school reunions.

We all have good years and bad years, but looking back four years smoothes out those peaks and valleys into discernable trends and clears up whether we’ve been taking two steps forward and one step back or the other way around.

Which is the more important question in the quest for real happiness: Am I better off now than I was four years ago? Or, am I better off now than I was 12 months ago?

We often set unattainable goals as New Year’s resolutions, but there is much that can be accomplished in four years and it is much more difficult to make excuses when we fall short. In four years I want to (pick one): own my own home; have a family; learn a new trade; finish college, be debt-free and live within my means are all very reasonable. Think of the pressure of trying to do any one of those things inside 12 months – or if we have been procrastinating nine months and change.

In addition to extending the timeline for our resolutions, creating a tradition of Leap Day resolutions moves our resolution-making process out of both the rush of the holidays and the dark days that immediately follow. The dead of winter isn’t when we are programmed to change. But as that last day of February becomes the first day of March, hope soon follows. If spring isn’t in the air, at least it’s on the same page of the calendar. The gluttony of December is long gone, replaced by the introspection of Lent and the anticipation of rebirth to come. It is time for us to think about the future.

Happy belated Leap Day. Here’s to the next four years.