End-of-Year Reflections
Journals, travel plans, letters, food, and the small rituals that help me pause before starting again.
Around June of every year, especially when I was working full-time, I found myself oddly envious of my children and friends who are teachers. Not just for the obvious reason — a long summer vacation — but because the break signifies progress, tidy conclusions, and new beginnings.
Year-end is the next best thing. For planner users, it’s a period of transition: moving from one physical book to another. Many people can’t wait to crack the spine on a new planner. Meanwhile, I hang on to the current year’s planner as long as I can. It feels lived in. There are too many notes, ideas, and memories I still refer to: countless doodles by my daughter from a year’s worth of adventures, or other vignettes that seemed insignificant at the time but have grown in meaning.
I feel a twinge of sadness knowing I’ll have to leave the 2025 planner behind sooner this year, as I start the 2026 one while embarking on a trip to see family in Japan. Despite the rhythm of this transition, I always catch myself paging through the planner one last time before archiving it on the bookshelf. In this final read-through, I note memorable moments in a larger notebook, creating a highlight reel and a personal index for my children if they should ever be curious when I am no longer around.
Taking a moment with planners and journals reminds me that even the small things are worth noticing and reliving. Life is measured in memories and connections, and writing helps me find my way through them.
Travel Journals / Slow Travel
I’ve enjoyed Kana‑chan’s Tending Gardens since I began writing here; her reflections on rural Japan may have influenced my choice to visit lesser-known cities and towns on this trip, stopping at major cities only as needed. This time, I’m planning less to leave room for serendipity. I hope to get lost sometimes.
It’s a different kind of travel, bringing a sense of magic and adventure back. My travel journal will plant seeds: little notes to remind me to be present, observe, and discover — whether it’s a local specialty or a total gamble on a rundown restaurant (like the one my partner picked in Karatsu 唐津市), which we lived to tell the tale.
I’m also drawing inspiration from unlikely places: design books referencing pour-over coffee shops, crossing paths with local artisans, discovering small exhibits and museums — letting sparks of inspiration catch fire.
Letter-Writing Kit and Station
As I packed for the trip, I noticed several library books still with me, including The Healing Power of Korean Letter Writing. Letter writing has resurfaced for me: slow, poetic, creative, revealing, and fun. I regret having let it go. It’s easy to forget that not long ago, posting letters was the only way to stay in touch with loved ones, short of calling or travelling vast distances to meet them in person.
I’ve rekindled my love for all things epistolary, updating a Traveler’s Passport notebook into a letter-writing kit: stamps, envelopes, letterhead, addresses — everything ready for tiny snippets when waiting in cafes or travelling. I’ve also updated the escritoire for both journaling and epistolary duties, curating a collection of postcards, ink stamps, and a photo printer — reducing friction to connect via snail mail should inspiration strike. It was liberating to overcome long-standing biases about how much effort it takes to write a simple letter. It makes me wonder what other tiny frictions, old assumptions, invisible habits, we carry with us that we could easily overcome.
For once, accumulating stationery has paid off. Using it — the last sheet of letterhead, wax seal, or bottles of ink — is oddly satisfying.
A Page From My Travel Journal: Poetic Food Names
I’ve been journaling in my travel journal even though some entries have nothing to do with the trip. I was preparing dinner and my partner named certain foods in Japanese: ケチャップ (kechappu) or ワンタン (wonton, 雲呑). That led me down an etymological rabbit hole: ketchup likely originated as a fermented fish sauce in China, travelled through Southeast Asia via traders, and eventually evolved into the steadfast tomato sauce we know today — the one that comes with every order of a full English breakfast or fries.
Wonton, meaning “cloud swallow,” also fascinated me. I realized most people think of the dish more than its poetic meaning, but I couldn’t stop sketching cloud-like pillows in my journal. The list of dish names continues to grow: from Phoenix Claws (鳳爪) to Buddha Jumps Over the Wall (佛跳墙). In my mind, these dish names evoke rich poetry, heroic tales, or the grace of traditional brush art (none of which survived in my sketches).
Do you keep a travel journal?
Over time, I’ve become more comfortable using a travel journal to plan and capture fleeting memories on the trip. Instead of reaching for the phone that often takes me away from the moment, the travel journal is always within reach. How about you?
Reflection on Productivity & Celebration
Browsing recent reads, I get the sense that our hustle culture motivates us to be our own productivity coach: set goals, plan, achieve, and repeat. We often move on so quickly that we rarely savour our own accomplishments. Perhaps, planning culture fuels this as well, offering satisfaction in the checkmark rather than reflection.
Taking a moment to notice our achievements — even the small ones — amplifies the moments that matter, according to researchers.1 When I worked in UX design, I was all too aware of the forces and cognitive biases working against us,the hedonic treadmill, the arrival fallacy2 and how easily we overlook the satisfaction of what we’ve just achieved. For this reason, I feel compelled to work even harder. We simply don’t celebrate enough.
Journaling lets me accomplish this. As I think about the new year, I remind myself: don’t sell yourself short like the good riddance current year crowd. Journal, reflect, and savour what you’ve done.
For me, that includes organizing my thoughts enough to carry out a vision and starting this Substack. Or, rather than simply admiring from afar, I reached out to Henokien-like product companies for opportunities to work together. That’s another reason for travelling to Japan. Now, having caught wind of this, I find myself quietly celebrating and feeling grateful more often.
A Short Break and a Heartfelt Thank You
With an extended stay with family over the New Year, I hope to make, create, and capture experiences while living out of a suitcase. I look forward to returning with new pages, fresh perspectives, and a few postcards out to friends and family from Japan.
I am deeply grateful to everyone who found me, read, commented, or shared a quiet moment with these posts. Thank you for letting me write alongside you. I may send a few small Notes from my journey if luck and inspiration find me. These words are for you, my readers, who make this practice feel shared rather than solitary.
✒︎
Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting Blessings versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377–389.
Hedonic treadmill: the tendency for humans to quickly return to a baseline level of happiness despite positive or negative events. See Brickman & Campbell, 1971, for the original formulation.
Arrival fallacy: the belief that achieving a goal will bring lasting happiness, when in reality the effect is often fleeting. Discussed in Dan Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, 2006.
The cloud-like wontons! What a treat it is to get to see your journal pages - thank you for taking the time to share. I plan my trips digitally and take photos/notes on the go using my phone, but I collect as many pieces of ephemera as I can and memory-keep in my travel journal. I often leave room for pictures so I can print and paste them once I'm home. Though I enjoy reliving the moments and reflecting later, I would love to experiment with travel journaling real-time as much as possible, even if it means I leave the corner of a page empty or I can't write about every detail.
Can you tell the poll questions made me think about the way I capture travel memories? It was a fun exercise. Wishing you the best on your upcoming family trip!