Up in Ontario

A Leap Year

I just noticed that it's a leap year. February 29th is the date today and the next February 29th won't be for another four years. So what? Well, just this: it started me thinking about time and how it passes.

What if you were born today? Would you grow old at 1/4 the pace of everyone else? That may sound like a silly question, but we measure our life in years and we measure our years in anniversaries of our birth (birthdays) and our birthdays fall on a single day. So sticking to those rules, someone born on February 29th would only grow old at 1/4 the rate as someone born on any other day of the year.

Am I being pedantic here? Pointing out the obvious in a boring way just to amuse myself? I don't think so. At least, I don't think so now. I thought so at first, then I thought about it more and found that a real sense of mystery and discovery did exist around leap years, that leap years are like lifting the veil of our preconceptions, preconceptions that allow us to function in our quotidian lives, and revealing the messiness and arbitrariness of the world around us.

We humans are fastidious time managers. We measure time in increments smaller than any of us can actually discern without the aid of tools designed specifically for such a purpose. We celebrate timing in our races. We grow frustrated by timing when it does not suit our purposes, when it slips away never to return again. We think we know time because we pay so much attention to it everyday: when we go to bed, when we get up, when we leave, how long we work, how long we exercise, how long until the potatoes are cooked. But then along comes a leap year and we're faced with extra time, unaccounted for, outside of the regular boundaries of our calendar, an extra day tacked on every four years to balance out the structure we have created around the complex interplay of planets and gravity and the star we depend on for life.

Most people I know or have heard of, if born on February 29th, celebrate their birthdays on February 28th. It seems as if their real birthday collapsed and shunted them backward a day, except in a leap year when they celebrate on February 29th. But they do not age any differently (that I know of) from anyone else. They still grow up at the same rate, gain weight beyond when they want to, lose the tone and elasticity of their skin, wrinkle and begin to shrink like anyone else.

So what is the purpose of measuring our age? To gain a sense of control over the passing of time? To be able to account for events? To have a framework around which we can structure our memories? To control the privileges and responsibilities we have: drinking, driving, voting, retiring. To have a universal way of saying, "at that time in my life, when I was n years old." To have something to measure before we die? I don't know, I'm wondering. Probably because we rely on habit and ritual to create and reinforce our identities, we need time.

We also use time to personify the things we don't want to acknowledge. How many times have you heard "I don't have time" used as a replacement for saying "I am not willing to do that" or "I cannot make that a priority so I cannot do it?" Or how about "time to go" in lieu of "I want to go?" Or how about "time to get cracking" instead of "I want you to start doing this now?" How people treat time often serves as a surrogate for how they treat other people and themselves. Time becomes the deciding factor in decisions they don't want to make. But time is only what we make it.

Think of all the instances of the word time in our daily lives. We are time obsessed yet we think very little about time, apart from how to manage it better. We organize our lives around times and timing but time exists beyond the confines of our control. You can never have back the time that has passed. You can never actually lengthen the time you have. Yet it seems that we can. Some days time stands still. Some days time flies past. A duality exists in how I understand time. On one hand, the passage of time seems tyrannical and unfair; we are born, we live, maybe we procreate, we create, maybe we leave something behind, we all die. On the other hand, the passage of time is a great comfort; time marches on, heals all wounds, acts as the great equalizer.

I am 28 years old now and if I were born on a leap year I would be only 7.