Today Is a Gift
That Is Why It Is Called the Present
Sometimes you stumble upon wisdom in unexpected places. For me that place was our New Jersey basement fifteen years ago, when my kids and I watched Kung Fu Panda. The full quote referenced in the title is “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.”
The other day, thinking about this line, I got curious and posed the following question to friends and family: If you were magically granted the gift of an extra day, how would you spend it? In this scenario, the magic includes the extra day only. You don’t get the ability to teleport, time-travel, fly, or become invisible. And this day exists in a regular timeline; whatever you do will affect your story going forward. But, with these provisos, if you had a whole additional day handed to you, what would you do?
Do you have your answer in mind? Great! Let’s find out what everybody said!
I would be remiss if I didn’t note at the outset that this is, in the words of my favorite talk show host Brian Lehrer, “an informal, unofficial, thoroughly unscientific poll.” Obviously, my friends and family are not a random sample, nor should we take the opinions of the people who chose to answer my question as representative of everyone. But I still think we can derive some valuable lessons from these responses.
Our Survey Says . . .
For some of us, this question is moot, because we are lucky to have free time every day.
For example, my friend Rick comments, “Being effectively retired with no daily obligations apart from feeding the pets, it’s not clear how any extra day would be different from the days that I currently have.”1 I’m reminded of those Jane Austen novels that confused me back in college. “How can the characters be planning a ball, which will go into the wee hours, for a Tuesday night?” I wondered. It hadn’t yet dawned on me that people who don’t have to wake up early to get to work can throw a party whenever they please.
A second category of responses reminds me of a little story: Last fall, my husband and I walked past a tree that was weighted down by scores of roosting birds. “Oh look!” I said. “They’re migrating!” “Well, they’re not migrating now, they’re resting,” my husband noted, quite reasonably. And that’s when I had my epiphany: Resting is part of migrating!
Anyway, whether we admit it or not, we humans are like those migrating birds. If we want to get anywhere, we need to stop our frenzied activity periodically so that we can restore ourselves. Unsurprisingly, the busiest people I know all said they would use their day for some rest and relaxation. Or, as my daughter, an English major with several hundred pages of reading to plow through every week, says, “I’d use it for a complete downtime day.” Amy K agrees: “I would sleep. All day. I still work for myself and am my sole provider. At 62, it would be pure magic to not have to get out of bed. Oh, and someone can bring me a coffee, too, before I doze back off.” And new mom Natalie has a similar reaction:
If we had an extra weekend day, it would be easier for me to strike a balance between socializing and rest. . . . A busy weekend makes me feel like I didn’t really have a true “day off,” even if the activities were fun. With a third day, I could always have at least one day dedicated to rest and chores while still being able to see people.
Other friends mentioned creativity and nature.
Lightwing comments,
I would use it to clean up and utilize our craft room. . . . I am overwhelmed with things I have to create (client work) and things I have to fix/clean/maintain (life) and rarely get to focus on creating things for fun. So, I would use the free day to matte and frame a photo, or sew something, or bead, or paint.
My uncle, an inveterate outdoorsman, would “head to the wilderness to camp, bike, or hike.” Me too, Uncle Gene! My perfect day is a hike in nature with family and friends (and the dog), for example in one of the most magical places on earth, Switzerland’s Lauterbrunnen Valley:
Everyone wanted to spend time with people they care about:
Ty said, “I’d like to take a small family trip to the coast and show my son the ocean. He’s seen the Puget Sound and whatnot, but not the ocean proper yet.” Laura would “Spend it playing board games and/or hiking in the mountains with my husband and kids. Those are my favorite times anyhow.” My mom had a similar idea: “I would have the whole family at a resort playing games, swimming, and having meals together.” My high school friend Lee agrees. He would “Spend it with my kids at a musical, then museums, dinner, then watching stars, playing with our puppies on the beach with drinks until sunrise. Wait. . . . We do that every year. We call it a stolen day.” And finally, my dad had the most heartwarming response of all: “I would go back to St. Lawrence Church and marry your mom again!”
As for my son, well, he didn’t want to choose between relaxing, creating, and spending time with friends. His answer was “All of the above!”: “I’d see what movies were playing, go for a walk, spend time writing, and find out if friends have an extra day too so we could meet up.”
Love and Loss
Some respondents wished they could connect with loved ones they had lost. They regretted missed opportunities and yearned for more time together. Louise would “go back in time and convince my mom to have her stomach removed instead of scraped for her stomach cancer. We would have had her with us longer.” Amy M asks, “Can I have a conversation with my grandmother? Nana was the most loving person in my childhood, but . . . she was in the beginning stage of dementia.” Similarly, Lisa would “Erase my mom’s dementia and spend a ‘girls’ day with her again like we used to, traveling around the world or around the neighborhood bargain clothes shopping.” Valerie wishes she could “Learn to make the soup my grandmother made for the holidays. Czernina.2 I have half the recipe on a small piece of paper. Sigh.” And Jessica would “Spend the whole day with my brother who passed last year. Just to hear his laughter and listen to his wisdom one more time.”
If we are lucky enough to have parents and older relatives who are still alive and well, what is stopping us? Today is a gift. Why not use our gift to text, call, or visit them?
What People Didn’t Say
Attentive readers will have observed that not a single person said “Gee, I think I’d spend my extra day aimlessly scrolling online.” No one said they would spend their day pushing themselves at the gym, doing extra work for their boss, advancing their careers, or trying to improve themselves and maximize their potential.
This makes intuitive sense, doesn’t it? No one has ever said on their deathbed, “I regret having so many loving relationships, because without friends and family to distract me, I could have climbed much higher on the career ladder.” In fact we have data, from “the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done,” that it is not money or status that will make us happy. The study, which has followed hundreds of people from all backgrounds since 1938, has a “simple and profound conclusion: Good relationships lead to health and happiness.”
I Was Being Tricky!
When I posed my question, I didn’t mention that we do in fact get an extra day handed to us this year: Leap Day!
Ok, fine, I know that this year Leap Day falls on a Thursday, so most of us will be stuck at school or work. Plus, every leap year there is grumpiness about how the extra day comes in February rather than, say, June. But time is fungible. We can take our free day in June, on our birthdays, or whenever we’d like.
So are you with me, readers? Let’s all commit to accepting the gift of a free Leap Day sometime this year. And when we do take our Leap Day, maybe we will allow the responses in this essay to influence how we use the gift of our extra day. We could spend our free time with family, on hobbies, in nature—or we could be like Kelly Kapoor (at 4:28 below) and choose nap!
As Milton Said, “They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait”
One final thought, about what our culture values. Of course we are right to honor hardworking, ambitious people who accomplish extraordinary things. But we could also give some respect to those who have rejected hustle culture and have instead chosen a leisurely, companionable pace filled with friends, family, and community. Perhaps we know people who have retired early and now spend their days volunteering. Or maybe they chose to forgo a paying career so they could stay home with the kids. Or they opted for a job that brings less money and status but also allows them to enjoy more of our most precious resource, time. These choices aren’t second-best; as my informal, unofficial, thoroughly unscientific poll suggests, time with loved ones is what we all would choose if we could. So let’s start! Let’s gather our loved ones together and take a leap!
How about you, readers? What will you do with your Leap Day? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Speaking of leaps, remember parkour? I love these wild guys!
If I may step on my soapbox for a moment, the boundless energy of these young men reminds us that recess is important. Students need a Leap Day too—or at least some time for free, rough-and-tumble play in order to discharge their lively kid-energy. If we want our children to be successful and happy in school, we ought to let them run around and play so that they can return to the classroom restored and ready to learn.
Rick is being too modest here. He volunteers for seniors in his community, driving them to doctors’ appointments, helping them with shopping, and taking them out on errands.
In theory, we should have two gift days a week. In practice, at least in this corner of the world, you're never more than an e-mail away from unexpected extra work, or that nagging feeling that if you just worked one more Sunday you might catch up with the things that have been piling up again. "Do it however and whenever you like, but I need it by Monday." has a tendency to become Sunday.
It gives you a whole new respect for the old idea that you get one Sabbath a week, but you and everybody in your culture takes it very seriously. The Rationalists, despite being mostly atheists (albeit Jewish atheists), said in Sabbath Hard and Go Home (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p7hW7E3fHF3PDzErk/sabbath-hard-and-go-home):
"In Jewish law, it is permissible to break the Sabbath in an emergency situation, when lives are at stake. If something like the Orthodox Sabbath seems impossibly hard, or if you try to keep it but end up breaking it every week - as my Reform Jewish family did - then you should consider that perhaps, despite the propaganda of the palliatives, you are in a permanent state of emergency. This is not okay. You are not doing okay. "
With the small modern adaptation that "people you care about" can be a lot wider than your immediate family, I wish something like a respect for spending time with people you care about were more of a thing in modern society - if necessary, guarded by the wrath of a God so almighty that even your boss can't take that time away.
How do you feel about this as a way to get an extra day, from Ann Althouse blog featuring an exercise trainer who emailed this to her clients: "Following my therapist’s advice, I’m taking a day off tomorrow to recharge my energies to continue giving the best in my sessions. Can we reschedule?"