GranolaBox

I know this is a little bit late, but I’ve been behind in my reading. This is a gem from my favorite local muckraker and guest blogger Lappe Parrish.

Is Leap Day more significant than most people tend to acknowledge? What exactly does “any day” to the calendar do to our intrinsic sense of time?

One of the things that becomes apparent if we ask the two questions above is that our calendar has anomalies: the days do not fit smoothly into the years. Figures are real but imprecise. The days are a human convention.

Leap Day is an attempt to correcting inaccuracy in human perception. We perceive days. We wish to mark the annual progression of the Earth’s dance around the sun. If we don’t add a day every four years we would fall further and further behind in our calculations until summer would be in winter and vice versa.

Humans and other small creatures perceive the sun rising and the sun setting and we call it a Day. From a larger perception the light of the sun pours over the earth as it turns. And every 24 hours, approximately, the earth makes one turn, but night and day continue nonstop in a process not unlike the in and out of breathing of our lungs.

To sneak in an extra day in order to make us feel more comfortable with the universe seems pragmatic there are subtle and not-so-subtle repercussions.

If we can acknowledge that on some level we have just been shoved into a new pattern, we may be able to take in stride the arrogance and added stress, or change associated with weekday.

Quantum leap or quantum jump is a term invented in 1926 to signify an abrupt transition from one discrete energy state to another.

Filed under: EWAKI, Lappe Parish on March 25th, 2008