LeapYearLesson

LEAP YEAR DAY
February 29

In leap years, which have an extra day on February 29, there are several options of how to handle the extra day. One option is simply to continue to the next lesson, and thus finish the year a day early, or by repeating the final lesson six times instead of the five times called for. This has the effect of shifting all the lessons to a different day of the calendar for the rest of the year. In these lesson notes, we have chosen not to do this, so that the notes will be usable without change for any calendar year.

Another option is simply to repeat the lesson for February 28 (Lesson 59), or the one for March 1 (Lesson 60). Since these are already review lessons, this does not seem particularly useful.

Three remaining possibilities are: 1) Choose a favorite lesson, and do that lesson for the 29th; 2) take a day off, doing no particular practice; or 3) using the day to do a complete read-through of all ten lessons in Review I.

My recommendation is Number 3, but you can choose to do whatever you like. The reason I recommend doing a complete read-through of Review I is that these ten lessons, taken together, provide one of the clearest, most concise, and most readable summaries of the thoughts that the first fifty lessons have been trying to teach us. My friend, Robert Perry, has made the comment that this Review is so plain and simply written that it ends any question as to whether the author is capable of such clarity and simplicity; it also makes us realize that, if other parts of the Course such as the Text are written with greater complexity, there must be good reason for it.

As the review instructions themselves state, "We are now emphasizing the relationships among the first fifty of the ideas we have covered, and the cohesiveness of the thought system to which they are leading you" (W-pI.rI.In.6:4). What better way to gain a sense of the cohesiveness of the thought system than to read through the entire review at one sitting?

There are twenty pages in Review I, but with so much white space that it really amounts to little more than ten pages. The entire Review can be read aloud in under thirty minutes; I know because I have recorded it on tape. (You might even want to try this yourself, if you have a tape recorder. I found that listening to the entire review repeatedly as I drove to and from work was a powerful learning tool.) Try to set aside a half hour some time during the day, and to read the whole thing at a single sitting. If you read fast, then read it all two or three times. Try to focus, as the Review suggests, on the relationships between the ideas, and the cohesiveness of the entire package.