Tempus Fugit
Virgil's Georgics, ancient poems about agriculture, naturally include a consideration of the passing of the seasons, and a warning to the farmer inclined to sloth that time escapes and, if unused, is lost forever; tempus fugit. Escaping, fleeing, is also rendered in archaic English as 'flying' and thus we get our adage, time flies. It does, too - and a new year is a good time to monitor the arrow's flight.
How does that relate to stationery? Well, we're talking about keeping a diary, of course. There are modern, faddish terms like 'journalling' which might apply here too, if you prefer a verb, but it's a very old custom.
It's an old custom which has survived for a reason, though. As tempus does all that fugitting-about, keeping a note of roughly what happened and what you thought or felt about it both maintains a record for the future (so that it doesn't all become a blur) and focuses the mind on the good stuff. Even in the topsy-turvy pandemic pandemonium, there are still plenty of things which make life worth living, from an ad-hoc encounter on a socially-distanced amble to a wild bird which visits the garden, and popping them in the diary helps to hold on to happier memories. A previous age called it counting one's blessings, while the hipsters call it mindfulness - and whatever name you give it, it works.
OK, OK, enough philosophising - we did promise stationery. The other great bonus of writing a diary, which should absolutely be your new year's resolution if you haven't arrived at one yet, is that it is the perfect excuse to use a lovely notebook and the sort of posh pen or luxury graphite that you couldn't possibly associate with, ya know, work. There's a double benefit, too, as writing with proper, old-fashioned kit feels nothing like communing with the interwebs on yet another computer, which helps to give the brain a daily break from digital overload. Oh, and if anyone questions where your pocket money is going, well, you need it for your wellbeing, don't you? Should muggles protest, this spell disperses: time flies like an arrow... fruit flies like a banana.
