Dear friends,

I keep a careful journal of my days and habits. What did I buy? What did I eat? What was I grateful for? I do this mostly so that I can understand myself better, so that I can flip through the year as twelve two-page spreads and identify the patterns that facilitate my being. There are other services we use these days that serve similar functions—apps to track how much we’ve read, to count our steps, and to log in the ethereal, placeless cloud what we’ve done with the hours in our days. It strikes me that attempting to understand my own being is not so simple as knowing how many nights I went to sleep past midnight. To ascertain one’s own essence is not like catching a football or the flu or a butterfly. But maybe it is. Maybe it really is that simple.

Never dream with thy hand on the helm. 

– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

In earnest,

Sasha Rotko, EIC