February 29th

That extra day we get every four years that we let pass by and barely notice. And yet it’s a very important day. It delays the aging process. There’s another day between you and the birthday clock notching up another year.

By the time you get to twenty-eight, you’ve had a whole week of extra days, two extra weeks by fifty-six, and by eighty-four you are three weeks younger than you would have been had there been no February 29ths. Instead of being eighty-four and three weeks, you are only eighty-four. Think what you could have done with that time if only you had noticed.

And what if you’re born on February 29^th? You get an extra three years between each birthday. So by the time you reach your twenty-first, you have squeezed in eighty-four years’ worth of experience.

If you really want some fun, you can cross the International Date Line on February 29^th. You don’t just play with time, you confuse direction. If you travel eastwards across it, you leave the Far East and end up in The West, and you time-travel to twenty-four hours ago, giving you the same day again. You can double-book yourself into two hotels in two continents on the same night and sleep in both. If you do that on February 29^th you don’t just get one extra day; you can have two.

Of course if instead, you went from west to east by heading west, you’d time-travel forward and skip a day. Unless the day you skip is February 29^th, because for three years out of four that day doesn’t exist anyway. So you could lose a day without actually losing a day.

But where’s the fun in that? Go the other way. It’s much more exciting!