What Will You Do with an Extra Day?

a leap year writing prompt for you

Welcome to Writing in Company. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points for you to write about what matters. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.

I accept that time is a construct—a way we humans have tried to capture and organize our experience. We can’t help it. Whether we are agrarian and wed to the seasons, or banking bits of billable minutes, we live in a world marked by the passage of time. So we need ways to notice it, count it, name it, and measure it.

A 24-hour day turns into a seven-day week which leads to months, years, decades, centuries, all measured with our clocks and calendars. We walk around with time buckled to our wrists, and we consult our time-keepers in paper and digital forms as we plan our way through the passage of time.¹

We do our best to wrangle time into something we can control. We keep time, mark time, waste time, invest time, like it is a commodity with limited resources. And in some ways it is, as anyone acquainted with grief can tell us. Our days with one another run out, and we don’t know when that will be, so we try to live gratefully and aware.

But time swirls in the background of all our days even when we practice living intentionally in the present. I can’t even write about that idea without using the idea of a “day” which is 24 hours, and we’ve all agreed to this parsing of time. Except when we remember that the earth wobbles along on an ellipse and an axis that aren’t symmetrical and regular, and there is more than one way to measure solar time, and if I had understood calculus I might be able to diagram it or explain it better.² So while we agree to the 24-hour day we also quietly agree that actually 24 hours per day isn’t right, and actually 365 days per year isn’t right either, and we have to jiggle time around to try and make our watches and calendars line up with seasons and the sun.

We’ll do it this week, with the crazy time-hop of adding a day to February in order to skip us back into rhythm. Since the 16th century, we’ve been adding a day to years divisible by four, unless the year is also divisible by 100, but also we add it to years divisible by 400. (Simple, right?) So in leap years we get this extra February 29th day, and we all just go along with it, and go to work or school like usual.

Wait, what? We get an extra day and we just do normal things?

Why is this not a great big planetary mental health day? A worldwide reset day? A day for all of us to breathe, rest, enjoy, and stop the madness of all the other time-tyrant days?

Or even better, a day to remember those with whom we’d give anything to have just one more day?

Poet Jane Hirshfield, in February 29—the poem she wrote about a friend’s unexpected death on a leap day—wrote:

An extra day—

Extraordinarily like any other.
And still
there is some generosity to it,
like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.

You can read the whole poem and more from the poet at The Marginalian, here: The Science of Why February 29 Exists and Poet Jane Hirshfield’s Ode to the Leap Day

a writing prompt

This leap year, on your extra day that has some generosity to it, I encourage you to spend some intentional time (there it is again, a consumer-driven use of time….) and imagine…

What would you do with an extra day?

Imagine a day where you don’t have to be anywhere, or produce anything. It can be as free from the ordinary, or as very ordinary as you’d like it to be. It’s your day.

How would you spend it? How will you spend it?

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1. I stopped wearing a watch during a sabbatical in 2018. My focus for those three months was on paying attention, and I knew I needed to pay attention in ways unhitched from a constant attention to measured time. The batteries in my watches all ran down, and I haven’t worn one since. I make do with the clock on my phone and my laptop, and somehow manage to not pay attention just fine.

2. Here’s some helpful info from NPR’s Morning Edition: Why do we leap day? We remind you (so you can forget for another 4 years)