February is one of those oddball months. Only 28 days. Except! Every four years we get another full day to leap ahead to what the calendar “really” should be.
What did people do before there was such a need for millisecond timings of things? Well, they watched the sun, they tested the temperature, they kept an eye on the sky for returning migrating birds, they paid attention to when the robins started to pull worms like lengths of elastic out of the cold, but no longer frozen, earth. The rhythms of outdoors set the rhythms of indoors. Farmers rose with the sun, or even before it’s breached the horizon, and then went to bed at the same time the sun took the last of the daylight with it.
Now, we set our own rhythms, sometimes at our peril. I used to get up at 4:30 a.m. so I could eat breakfast and work out at the gym before going to work. Of course, I compensated by going to bed at 8:30 or 9 p.m. to make sure I got in the right number of hours of sleep. Crazy, right? But it worked for me. I didn’t fall asleep at my desk…well, almost never. That is one of the luxuries of retirement. I can sleep until 7 a.m., or even later. What a slugabed! After 18 years of retirement, I still like getting up relatively early, but it’s so nice in the winter, when it’s still dark a while into the morning, to be able to check the time, groan, and turn over to go back to sleep. Or just lollygag in bed, cocooned in a nice warm blanket.
But sometimes our own self-imposed rhythms are disturbed with a ripple, or sometimes even with a total tsunami. How we deal with those “blurps” in our well-structured lives can really make a difference. I remember the turkey on our first Thanksgiving, when we had a houseful of company. We bought one of those aluminum one-use roasting pans. When I took it out of the oven, it folded right over on itself and–you guessed it–hit the floor, stock splashing everywhere. The five-second rule immediately went into effect as we scooped up the turkey and plopped it in another pan. But there went the gravy fixings. I, being a young and inexperienced cook, panicked. Thank God for the brother-in-law who cooked in the military. He went into action while I cried.
Having children calls for often and instantaneous reconfiguring. When is that batch of cookies going to school with the kid? Today? Today! When it happens once, it’s disaster. By the second time, we know where the 24-hour grocery stores are. Child’s first projectile vomiting/broken bone/car accident? It’s amazing how quickly we can pivot. Just remember to make sure the stove is turned off and the doors are locked when you leave for the doctor/hospital/police station.
Aging presents more and more instances to practice making abrupt turns, some 90º, some 180º. Either way, with the practice of our younger lives, we can make those changes. Some turns are graceful, like deciding on our own to give up driving, for safety’s sake, our own and others. Other turns are wrenching, such as adapting to health issues that can’t be fixed with a bandaid. By that time, we adapt because we have to. We’ve done it before, we can do it again.
But let’s not go there. Try this on for size:
We can handle many disruptions to our chosen rhythms. Then why can’t we handle the time change in the spring and fall? Don’t get me wrong, I think we’ve gone beyond needing such machinations. The farmers know what they’re doing. They don’t need an artificial system. The cows tell them when they need to be milked, the chickens know when to lay eggs and cackle about it.
Well, that’s human nature. To complain, that is. I guess it could be a lot worse. Even the human body adapts to the sun out longer in the spring. It’s our minds that resist.
The next leap year is 2028, so we’re right in the middle of the march from the last one in 2024. Here’s an opportunity to realign ourselves with the earth’s orbit around the moon. There’s no going back to the times when everything slowly set itself, without need for human-built clocks able to detect the resonance frequency of atoms. (I had to look that one up!) Life has become more complex, richer, varied, and challenging. When 2028 comes around, set aside that extra day to pick a personal rhythm tuned in to you, personally, and enjoy every minute of it. Do that even now, if you can!