[acimlessons_list] LEAP YEAR DAY--February 29

[Sue Roth]

LEAP YEAR DAY--February 29

In leap years, which have an extra day (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's lessons 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)
use 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,
or just take the day off. 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. 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 gives us reason to think that, if other
parts of the Course such as the Text are written with greater complexity,
there must be good reason for it.

The review instructions themselves state that this review emphasizes the
relationships between the ideas covered and "the cohesiveness of the thought
system" (W-pI.rI.In.6:4) that they represent. What better way to gain a
sense of this 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 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.