As the New Year dawns, savvy economic analysts, nerdy tech gurus and seasoned journalists are often asked to predict what the future foretells.
First of all, let me be frank, there is no one, absolutely no one like me, who can crystal-gaze into 2017 and tell exactly what the next 12 months will be like.
When people ask me how can I be so sure, I tell them of the many New Years I have seen flying by, my extensive experience that has seasoned me, so to speak, and I ask them to read my diaries, as they would get an idea about the angst that occurs as the first weeks of the New Year disappear with nothing much productive and life-changing happening.
Then, like a politician, the backtracking usually starts over the promises that were made, as the seasons start changing like the fast-forwarding of a video tape of a boring movie, and finally the despondency and defeat that sets in as the year slowly draws to a close with nothing achieved despite the hard fought negotiations and shameless pleading with oneself.
As the sunsets slowly close the curtain on 2106, I feel nostalgic and remember the time when I looked forward to getting a brand new diary with all the days and weeks and months, all clean and fresh like an unwritten slate, on which I could write anything I wished.
Nobody gifts diaries anymore, instead people tell you to download Google calendar, and apps called Evermore or Justdoit, or something like that, to keep track of your vanishing days and hours.
I remember the first diary I was gifted when I arrived in this region many new years ago. It was bound in soft, green leather and my name was embossed in gold lettering on the top right hand corner. With it came a thin, gold-plated pen that I found very difficult to write with. Only years later I realised it was not for writing but as a decoration to your shirt pocket.
On the first page of my new diary, I had to fill in all my personal details, my name, my family name, my middle name, my passport number, my date of birth, my address, my shoe size, my shirt collar size (15½cm) and my bank account number, since there was no such thing as hacking in those bygone days.
I did not know my address. After a few weeks, I realised the location of my accommodation was near the port, past the Yemeni eatery, and three streets after the MAK building.
I had no middle name, which was a problem in this part of the world as everyone should have a middle name, so a smart official in the bureaucracy added my father’s name and family name and his ‘given’ name, as my middle name, and suddenly I had an impressive and seemingly unending name that could never fit on a bank debit card.
The diary had other useful information like the GMT time in New York and a currency change formula for whenever I travelled to exotic countries, in my dreams.
It had stuff like the metric equivalent of a foot and holidays marked in both Gregorian and Islamic calendars.
I had re-gifted one of the fancy diaries to my wife and told her to journal and found years later she used it to write her grocery and laundry lists and the advance salary amount given to the maid.
Psychologists tell us how journaling can have a healthy and positive effect on our well-being and how writing down your goals gives you impetus to achieve them. Somehow, writing them down on virtual paper, on a tablet, is not the same thing and gives you an excuse to cop out and you can quietly erase your resolutions when no one is watching.
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ mahmood_saberi.
