In one of the earlier years of the last decade, a friend gave me a leather-bound notebook beautiful enough I decided then and there it was to preserve my most intimate thoughts and dreams, the year-end reflections.

Fast-forward almost 10 years later, the notebook has less than 20 of its pages filled out. At some point, I stopped writing. Why bother, I thought, noticing the transformation I had undergone as a person was so incrementally small from one year to another.

At the dawn of this new year, I once again don’t feel so drastically wiser than I was a year ago. And yet, something feels different.