Tag: Leap Year

A Month to Go(al)

In my personal calendar, this is an important milestone. One month until I hit the one year mark in publishing a daily blog post. A normal year is 365 days. I get to wrap up this accomplishment in 366 days being a leap year and all.

That’s just like me. Always taking off a little bit more than I can chew. And full confession, I will have hit my goal on March 13th. March 14th, 2023 is when I published my first post on this journey. So 367 days.

Like any destination I aim for, I certainly hope to get there. I wasn’t sure when I set out if I would. (I’m still not if I’m honest. A lot can change or go sideways in 30 days.) Like I said, I hope to get there.

I expect my posts over the next thirty days to be more reflective. More filled with figuring out what this exercise was all about. More filled with stock-taking. More winding up for the BIG FINISH. The false construct of a false deadline that is important to me and me alone.

What have I learned? The secret to life and living? Some aspects of what matters most in a lifetime are clearer to me.

The greatest learning may be that living life is much simpler than we conceive it to be in our heads. The basis are the basics. We deviate too far from them at our peril. The basics are essential to our survival.

I found this quote from Richard Feynman and it sums up an aspect of what I’ve learned and how I’ll shape my life moving forward. To keep moving forward seems to be the most consistent advice I’ve heard and read out of some of the world’s greatest minds.

For all of the deliberate obfuscation and mental gymnastics some people engage in to inflate their sense of importance, this advice is stupefying in its’ simplicity

Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.

Richard Feynman

By the way and by way of bringing up a non sequitur, speaking of love, today is Valentine’s Day.

A celebration of love they say.

From where I sit, it seems more like a celebration of chocolates and flowers and ballooning the bottom line of the companies that sell them

Not that I’m cynical.

I like chocolates and flowers as much as the next person.

Punctuating my looming period of deeper self-reflection, a sampling of chocolates can only assist the effort.

Leap Year Again

Today I am highly conscious of the fleeting passage of time and how we mark special occasions in our lives.

I’m not sure why we do that but I know I am driven by a sense of occasion. Any excuse for a party and gathering may be an adequate enough explanation.

Blog post number 330 today. In a row. Good heavens. Tempus fugit.

That means I only have 26 (or 27) blog posts left in my “publish once a day for one full year” blog posting challenge. Turns out it is a leap year. That messes with my math.

Leap year is so odd. Tell me if this explanation makes sense to you.

“A leap year is a calendar year that contains an additional day compared to a common year. The 366th day is added to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical year or seasonal year. Because astronomical events and seasons do not repeat in a whole number of days, calendars that have a constant number of days in each year will unavoidably drift over time with respect to the event that the year is supposed to track, such as seasons.” 

Wikipedia

I wish I could tell you that brings the rationale for leap year into clear focus for me and fully explains exactly why it happens every four years. It doesn’t.

I have met people born on February 29th. I felt sorry for thembecause they only had a “real” birthday every four years. A child’s perspective.

Back in Canada, decades ago, the iconic, if controversial, Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Elliott Trudeau went out for a walk by the Rideau Canal in Ottawa. When he came back in, he announced that very day that he was stepping away from the political arena for good.

Whatever else he was, Trudeau certainly had a flair for the dramatic and a sense of occasion.

In any case, leap year and February 29th are soon upon us. I have a minor surgical procedure scheduled that day. That will make it memorable for me.

I think how I have marked other memorable life occasions. Big birthdays are obvious. Always pulled out the fine china and bought flowers for those milestones. A wedding or two. Several babies born in our family circle and now growing up faster than speeding bullets.

How do I mark the end of a writing challenge? I don’t believe a party is in order. I might say thank you and compose a message of farewell about what this year of daily writing has meant to me.

It is ending differently than I had conceived when I started. I thought I might write a book as a parallel project to my daily blog posts. That was not only an ambitious but ultimately unrealistic goal.

The passions that fueled my creativity when I was younger and trying to survive have dimmed somewhat. Happily, the mantras that guided me have come to life in my heart and soul.

I have unburdened myself of many aggravations of the past. I have let go of many toxic people and influences that used to perfuse my daily life. I am generally calmer and more reasonable in response to life challenges.

I said more reasonable, not entirely reasonable. My bruised emotions and deeply embedded triggers can be set off in surprising ways that still catch me off-guard at surprising times.

But even the unwanted house build taking place behind us that enraged and disappointed me when it started has faded into the dull ache of acceptance.

That’s progress and maturity, I figure. It has been a constant truism in my life that when one door closes, another has opened.

For the sake of sanity, I prefer to believe that some great Higher Power mythically orchestrates all of our lives.

And while I recognize what unsubstantiated hokum that likely is, it is a comfort. And has been mostly true.

So when the big one year anniversary comes up on March 13th, I will mark it. By then, I may have figured out what my next steps are with my writing. I have several colleagues who publish posts on an ad hoc basis.

Truth be told, they seem to post something when Spirit moves them. Their publishing reminders pop up in my email. I get to visit with them for awhile and see where they are at, what they are doing and what is on their mind.

The only regret I have in hindsight about posting a daily blog this year has to do with the double sense of occasion I missed out on.

If I had done my math and planned accordingly, I would have started my blog on February 28th or March 1st last year. Then I could have celebrated Leap Year and the anniversary of Expressive Compulsive on February 29th.

Now nothing says I can’t celebrate this achievement on February 29th anyway except my slavish devotion to order and tradition. Order and tradition can keep us grounded and in place when the whole world threatens to spin off its axis.

I can’t think of any better time in history than now to promote and pursue that logic.