Leap year: no exceptions!

I can't resist the odd siren call of posting on Leap Day. However, I can't think of a post topic that is apropos.

And maybe that's the topic?

When I was very young, I guess I must have been about eight, I remember being introduced for the first time I recall to the concept of leap years. I was born in a leap year, as of course were many of my friends throughout school, being roughly the same age. In college, I had a friend who was actually born on Leap Day, making today either her 36th birthday or 9th, depending how you choose to look at it. (I did call and wish her a happy birthday, and actually got to celebrate her 5th birthday with her more or less, living with her in the same house at the time.) You'd think having a birthday of the 29th of February would be really cool, but despite the assurance of Cecil Adams, my friend only really felt like she was truly having a birthday on the actual 29th, and so only got a "real" birthday every four years. Thus, you are different, but in a way that isn't so much fun.

But back to my own youth... I recall thinking that it was odd but cool that some years were different. I really had no idea that the year had a (fairly) constant length, and that most years were 365 days, but some years were 366. (My own children, who are four-and-a-half are just now beginning to grasp the concept of seven-day weeks.) Those odd years seemed quite special, and of course, that odd day in itself. I also was quite taken with the concept that while years divisible by four had an extra day, years divisible by 100 did not. And yet, the year divisible by 100 that I eventually would experience would be an exception. So although leap years were an exception to the general rule, 2000 would be an exception to the exception to the exception. Somehow, I wasn't sure whether this was as cool as a regular leap year.

So I often thought, how interesting it would be to live in 1900, when there would be a year that was not in the regular cycle of leap years! Why was this exciting? Simply because it was something different! Of course, I still had something to look forward to in that I would be living through the change to a new millennium! Surely that was cooler than the change to a mere century. But 2000 seemed so far away, and of course then we'd have to live through the horror of intelligent computers killing our astronauts to keep us from knowing about space aliens, or something like that.

Of course now, having lived through the supposed change of the millennium and the actual change on New Year's Day 2001, the concept sinks in to an older and more experienced brain that whether the year starts with a 1 or a 2, whether it's New Year's Day or Leap Day or my own birthday, it's just another day, and these divisions we give to the times we live in are completely arbitrary. The millennium passing was not very exciting at all, even with the specter of the Y2K bug hanging over us. Whether today is February 29th or March 1st, all that really matters to me on a personal level is that it's Friday, and the weekend will be here by sundown.

The thing is, there's something sad about that. Not that we can change it, but there's a beauty to a mind that can look at days, even a day as mundane as a day in 1900 that didn't exist, but fell between the crack of February and March. A few months after that leap year in my youth, I was starting third grade, a new year that happened to be in a new school, with a new teacher, and anything could happen. This month, I moved into a new office, many days I write a new blog post, my children learn new things in school, and day by day I feel what even on the most exciting days is, compared to that excitement of youth, a crushing boredom.

How would it feel to get that sense of awe back? Could you watch the sun set, and not just see it as a beautiful sunset, but with the beauty and awe that you might have had with the very first sunset you ever saw? Could I put my children to bed tonight and look at them with the same profound sense of raw, new love that I felt seeing them for the first time on the day they were born? When you're young, everything is new and exciting, but when you're older, there are so many exceptions to that sense of wonder.

Is it possible to find a way to live life and find exceptions to the exceptions?

New Year's Irresolution

So, tomorrow is New Year's Day, right? This may not be a rhetorical question.

Within the year commonly referred to as 2008, Jews will celebrate the beginning of the year 5769 on September 29th. Many people in Asia will mark February 7th as the beginning of the year of the (Earth) Rat. For Muslims, the year 1429 starts on January 10th, and the year 1430 starts on December 29th. This can conceivably be confusing, you may imagine.

The fact is, I've always felt that celebrating new years and anniversaries was a custom that was somewhat questionable. The amount of time it takes the earth to orbit around the sun is really in some sense only interesting when it comes to agriculture, and not personally being a farmer, why should I care? We mark the days to give them significance, not because they have any inherent significance in themselves.

Even if they did have significance for their own sake, then we have to wonder, how do we properly mark that significance? There are, as implied above, numerous calendar systems, and there is no inherent reason to assume that any one of them is the best. The calendar we use here in the west has a 365-day year, but of course, that's not the actual time that it takes for the earth to move around the sun. How long does it take? Well, it's not 365.25 days, either, as you may have been led to believe. I'm not sure which is the exact measure one might wsh to use, but according to what I have read, the "Gaussian year" is 365.2568983 days, the "Sidereal year" is 365.2563604 days, and the "Tropical year" is 365.2421904 days. The odd upshot of the fractional part of the year and our attempts to adjust for it in our calendars is that a child born on New Year's Day 2008 would likely have the true anniversary of his/her birth on December 31st, 2008, due to the extra day we will be adding in February. Weird.

Really, though, I had a point in all of this, and it wasn't supposed to be a downer about the futility of trying to mark the passage of time in a universe that works like clockwork, if by "clockwork" we mean in the sense of a watch that that loses about a minute per day. The fact is that like so many things in our world that we have laid down as arbitrary rules and measurings of what's right, there is still a purpose, and a good one. So many of us, myself included, have some odd internal preference to live like anarchists and say, "Throw out the rules, all of them, and let me live as I choose, not by your schedule, not by your standards, not by your rules, but with true freedom!" But it is those very rules that give us the freedom that we really truly desire.

I hate living at the mercy of the clock and my work schedule, and I hate to have someone say, you must be sitting at your desk at such-and-such time, and you must take your break at this hour, and you have to stay here until such time as I say. I have to work the same time every day from Monday through Friday, although I'd much rather have the freedom to simply put in as many hours as I wish at whatever time interval I wish, on whichever days I wish. Yet... I said to a friend the other day, "Meet me for lunch on Thursday at 11, okay?" I would not have had the chance to meet with my friend without the common rules of the clock, an understanding of the days of the week, and the annual commemoration (artificial though it is on many levels) of the birth of Christ, which had given him occasion to be in town and visit family.

Yes, like so many of the building blocks of our society, I have a love-hate relationship with the calendar and the clock. I'm a horrible procrastinator, and the people and institutions of the world around me constantly push me with deadlines that I hate, but if they chose not to, I wouldn't give them the time of day, as they say.

Confession time: In 2007, I procrastinated in sending in my vehicle registration papers. I ended up paying a late fee. When I finally sent in the papers, I got my registration sticker, but procrastinated in putting it on the car. I got pulled over and ticketed. I procrastinated in paying off the ticket. Due to further procrastination, what should have been a $10 fine ended up turning into an astronomical amount that I shall not disclose here, and on top of that, because I procrastinated in reading my mail and paying of that increased fine in time, my license was suspended, and I will have to pay to get it reinstated. I am a victim of the calendar, but it's certainly not the calendar's fault, it's my own fault for ignoring it when it came knocking at my door.

There's a lesson to be learned in this, (Setting aside the obvious lesson of "Brucker is an idiot"?) and for some people it may be obvious, while for others not so much. Most of us, when we think of evil, think of an act of causing harm to another individual by our actions. Nonetheless, there is a strong tendency to overlook another sort of evil, which is the evil of knowing what is the right action to take, and not taking it. What I see in the situation I have put myself in, and the situation that many of us contemplate in taking the New Year as a time of self-evaluation, is a corollary sort of evil: the evil of knowing that which is the right thing to do, and putting it off for later.

So often in life, we know what is right; we even know that there is an action that we should do that is right, and failing to do it is wrong. Yet still, we hesitate. Is there a nasty habit that you need to stop? Is there a problem that you need to fix, and have been putting off? Is there an uncomfortable truth that you need to come to grips with, and have mentally avoided as long as you can? If it has to be the New Year for you to face up to those things, then so be it, but whenever you happen to be reading this, it is the New Year. It may be some culture's day to commemorate the completion of a solar cycle, or it may be the anniversary of someone's birth that you know. Every single day is the anniversary of something, and every single day is a good day to do that which is right. I don't know what that is for you, but if you know, then there is no better day than today to do it.