All the Meat Left on the Bone
Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes
During the three preceding years, the Leap Day is, as Hannah Arendt says, a space and time of no longer and not yet. It is the physical spatio-temporal manifestation of the extra energy that lingers at the fringes of the calendar, just waiting for the chance to emerge.
Leap Year is an effect of balance. It is the calenderial remainder of star-dusted math that’s traversed from the Julian to our current Gregorian means of day- and time-keeping. The comfortable irregularity of the Leap Year is an exception we welcome, or at least feel leisurely enough around—almost like a quarter-year tradition.
Invoking the word tradition, however, entails a consideration of what is at stake in the Leap Day, why we keep doing it and passing it on as we would a family heirloom. It perhaps appears that because we have been given twenty-four extra hours, we carry a duty to do something extra with them, something important or new.
This ‘importance’ thing has to do with us understanding what it means that time is passing, always. The metaphor we use to speak of time is, primarily, money. We say we don’t want to waste our time, we want to consider how to spend our time. We say, plainly, that time is money. There is no metaphor here, we literally equivocate time with money. Our language then shows us that time is our most valuable resource next to literal currency. It follows that both time and money are depletable, and they can be used in right and wrong ways. At each moment of the day, we have the potential to change something, actualize something, by doing or not doing. At each moment, we have the potential to alter the course of our days, and if our days are our lives, then in sum, the course of our lives.
Because we treat time as money, we also feel the burden of when there’s not enough—an uncomfortable squeeze like an old pair of pants you were sure would fit but, now sweating slightly after negotiating your thighs into them, are no longer so sure. In pants-terms, that squeeze signals a dissonance between the real and imagined realms of possibilities, and perhaps that it is once again time to go shopping, or running. In time-terms, that squeeze is called stress. It is the mental pinch, the caught breath, at the realization that there are all these things to do and not all the time in which to do them before they have to be done. We feel compressed by the not-enough-time the same way we do the jeans. And we want to rid ourselves of them. Stress is the antithesis to joy––it is the compression rather than the expansion of self over the planes of existence. It is worth thinking about this balance in our lives.
The existentialists thought that the ultimate philosophical question was whether the way we conduct our lives grants us the desire to live them again and again: would we be okay with the eternal recurrence? If we answer in the affirmative, then that is the measure of having lived a good and happy life. If not, it seems that somewhere along the way, our decisions and habits led us away from doing enough. The way in which we spend our time sets a primary condition for the yes-saying.
A friend of mine likes to say that “kids are a clock”— that his two sons are the strongest, most undeniable manifestation of not only the passage, but the acumulation of, time. That time builds. It accrues. The pay-out? Well, to put it bluntly, is non-existence. What time builds towards is––must be––the total annihilation of time itself for the human subject, if that is what we consider to be the nature of death.
Our Being, according to Heidegger—and perhaps more so common sense—is necessarily defined by and confined by temporality. I wake up every morning almost exactly two minutes before my alarm chimes good morning because rhythm is built into all existences.
Leap Day, however, seems to either throw off this rhythm, like a novice drummer not quite on-beat. The Leap Day is an improvisation of time in more ways than one. Astronomical math of 45 BCE showed that the Earth-Sun rotation takes not merely 365 days but 365 and ¼ days, quiet quarter days that hide in the crossed-out corners of the calendar until the fourth year where they come together to give us 366 days. Simple, right? But, actually, not quite: a solar year is, in fact, a measurable 365.242 days.
So, beyond giving us the opportunity to think about the $50 bill Beth Ann Fennelly may one day find among the volumes on her shelves, the patterns we find ourselves following, the Leap Year tells us about our blundering yet necessary imprecision in the way we conduct ourselves as a time-bound species. On a Leap Year, we don’t simply account for the time we have overlooked, we actually make manifest five hours that the sun did not give us. We build a space for non-existent time and probably sleep through it. Does that bother you?
It does not bother me, for all things, I think, are inevitably imprecise. Because they are bound, filtered, and limited by language and consciousness—themselves tricky, imprecise yet inescapable mediums. The Leap Day, it seems, then, is the actualization of our imprecision. It is a celebration of the instability of human-created systems of organization. We could call it Leap Day, Vault Day, Rise-Over-Run Day—but no matter what name we give it, the sun will rise and fall without a second thought, or a first one at that.
But what we call something governs the scope and breadth of what it will be, and the word ‘leap’ denotes big, sudden movements over some sort of gap or abyss. Those five-ish extra hours are the abyss. Maybe in thinking about them, maybe we will realize that perhaps we have this extra day not just as a temporal anomaly, but time that urges us to think about all the meat we left on the bone.