Listen up, everyone: a very important event is about to take place. Take out your calendars . . . actually, take out your watches, because you will have to set them. We are about to gain one whole second!
It’s called a “leap second,” and it happens once every ten years. For those who are not familiar with the term (I wasn’t either), on June 30 a second will be inserted into our day, to help reconcile the slight discrepancies between the atomic clock and actual solar time.
So the big question is: what are we going to do with that second?
You see, in the old days a second wasn’t worth much. It was just a second, some minuscule unit of time that passes so fast we don’t even realize it. But we live in a different world. One second is exactly 1/15th of an Instagram video, 1/7th of a Vine. And you gotta agree that when your entire video is 7 seconds, every second is very important. Our attention span is much shorter, so each second is much more valuable.
I am not sure we can really plan how to use that one extra second we are gaining, but I am sure we can start adding good to our lives in small bites.
Take, for example, the way you approach a new mitzvah. It’s perfectly okay to say, “I’ll start learning Torah one minute per day,” “I will dedicate two minutes to prayer,” or “I will think for a few minutes about my children’s Jewish education” (yes, that’s a mitzvah too).
Because a second used is a second earned.
