I feel like anything we do on a leap year day is a time capsule, ready to be opened and reviewed in four years’ time. People mature in that length of time and their lives progress, and as I look forward now I feel quite excited by the prospect of 29 February 2020 potentially holding something completely unexpected. In 2016, however, things aren’t quite as mysterious and once again I’m finding myself spending the morning on my day off relaxing with a warming cup of tea. Regardless of how ill-advised lounging around again might be, though, I have had an idea (but I’m not sure if anybody’s beaten me to it).

Because I sometimes struggle to actually get around to committing to some things, or reaching goals as people try to with their New Year’s resolutions, why couldn’t there be an alternative option – a more manageable way of ticking off the accomplishments? To my knowledge, there is no such thing as a “leap year’s resolution”, and I think we’ve all been missing a trick there (unless, of course, I’m wrong and it does already exist). If we all utilised those, we’d still have an aim – to get whatever we want to done before the next 29 February – but we’d have a bit more time to actually be bothered about taking action. It’d essentially just be extra leeway, a shorter-term bucket list of sorts. For me personally, I think it could help me to grasp my life in chunks at a time, preventing me from having to organise all of my life ambitions in one go.

I should explain that when I first started this post earlier on, I ended up deleting all but the first paragraph to start again. Even now, part of me thinks that I’m talking total rubbish with this idea. If I am, it might just be that I wanted to say something lasting and meaningful to look back on in four years’ time, but even if that is the case, I could potentially find something to aim towards in the meantime, to make the best of the space. I can’t remember what I wrote at the start of the year regarding New Year’s resolutions, but maybe using the space between leap years would take some pressure off. Think about it – if you don’t fancy giving up chocolate this year, you could do it next year. Or the year after that. Or the year after that…

Mason