The trees outside are bare, the street empty and quiet. There is little appetite to leave one’s home on the first morning of the new year. Instead, I pour a steaming cup and settle into my reading chair. I realize now how dated that sounds, like the father from a black-and-white sitcom unfolding his newspaper in the den after a hard day at the office. It gets worse, as I pull out a pair of spiral notebooks: one old and scuffed, the other fresh and new.

I still write on paper. Each notebook is about the size of a small hardback book, a couple inches taller than it is wide. The covers are thick cardboard, the color of a manila folder and dense enough to hold shape if you need to write without a desk. The paper is thin but not so much so that it feels cheap, pale green ruled with dark green lines. In short, an ordinary notebook from a time when notebooks were ordinary.

Call it a character flaw. Friends poke fun. People stare if I so much as write a list in public. And whoever stocks the supply room at work doesn’t much believe in paper at all. Our species has moved on to smart devices that do the thinking for you, watch the time and cry out if you get off track. It’s not the rise of the machines I fear; it’s the abdication of humanity. Besides, paper works better. Pixels come and go, and our brains act accordingly. But we remember what we read on paper, and even more so that which we write by hand.

Flipping through the old notebook is like watching a recap before the next episode. Its pages are scrawled with black ink. All caps, neat and clear, when I was planning a trip or setting workout objectives. But if I was racing to get down my thoughts or feelings, the letters get sloppy, the case inconsistent, the words leaning forward like a halfback fighting through an arm tackle. The most important notes, I’m convinced, are the ones that even I can’t read.

I flip open the new notebook and write “2025” in block letters. Though I type this in November, I know how it plays out. Maybe I label the year with a theme, or maybe I dive right into stacks of goals and schedules, lists of projects I want to take on and aspects of my life I hope to set right. I don’t believe in resolutions so much as choices, and while our Gregorian calendar is rather arbitrary, we need rituals like this to give us a fresh start now and then.

View Comments

How many more of these have I got left? The pile of notebooks I accumulated before the university bookstore slashed their paper inventory is running low. But for today, I can close the book on last year and write out my intentions for the next. And they feel real, at least on paper.

Join the Conversation
Looking for comments?
Find comments in their new home! Click the buttons at the top or within the article to view them — or use the button below for quick access.