With five months left in the year, I often think about how I'm going to spend the rest of it, and what I've done so far. I finished my first year of college, I've gotten two different promotions, became obsessed with a new TV show and participated in a huge scavenger hunt known as GISHWHES.

As far as the rest of my year goes, the only thing I know for certain is I begin my sophomore year of college, and everything else is undecided.

On July 6th of this past year the U.S. Naval Observatory announced that timekeepers at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service discovered that at 6:59:59 p.m. ET on December 31st, there will be an extra second in time.

How this works is kind of like when we have Leap Years. A Leap Year is used to fill the space of time that accumulated in the last four years to help balance out the Earth's axis because the Earth's rotation doesn't perfectly fit in twenty-four hours.

The extra second, known as a leap second, is used to fill the time between Earth's speed and the most accurate clocks.

Science writer, Dan Frank explains the importance of the Leap Second when he stated, “If you don’t insert a leap second, eventually time based on those atomic clocks will be out of whack with solar time. It’s not a perfect solution. But Aristotle and Heraclitus were arguing about [time] 2,500 years ago, and we’re still arguing about it.”

Now with this unnatural piece information, the world is asked this question: What will you do with your extra second?

The answer to this question depends on how your year has gone so far. If this has been the worst year of your life, you'll probably spend it crying or pissed off over the fact that an extra second is keeping you from your fresh start.

If it's been the best year of your life, I guarantee your answer will be more optimistic.

I've thought about what I would do with an extra second, and my initial response was pessimistic, because it's only a second. It's not like with that extra second I can go on that trip to Ireland I've always wanted to go on, or fit a whole series on Netflix in there.

But as I thought about it, a lot can happen in a second.

A distracted driver can kill someone in a second. A newborn baby could take its first breath in a second. Someone could even fall in or out of love in a second. In a single second, someone’s day could be made or broken.

So with my extra second, I've decided that I'll do something that will make someone’s day.

I'm going to smile. Because as E.E. Cummings put it, "twice I have lived forever in a smile."