The shortest week of the year again, and I have invented a December ritual that I am hereby making annual: the inventory of light.

It works like this. I printed the year's photographs, the real ones, the keepers, and spread them across the big table like a card game. Then, with coffee and the radiators ticking, I walked the year the way you walk a gallery, and for each photograph I asked the auditor's question: was I there for this?

Not physically, obviously I was physically there, I took the picture. I mean the other attendance. Because if this notebook has one master finding after four years, it is that presence is a spectrum, not a switch. There are photographs where I can still feel the wind that was blowing, name the song that was playing two streets away, the entire moment preserved in full resolution, because I was all the way inside it when it happened. And there are a few, fewer every year, where the image is sharp and the memory is thin, because the man holding the phone was mostly elsewhere, rehearsing some conversation, checking some internal weather. Same camera. Different photographer.

The physics of the ritual, since there is always physics. Light, I wrote once, spends a hundred thousand years escaping the sun and eight minutes reaching us, and the entire journey is wasted unless something absorbs it. A photon that nothing catches just keeps going, forever, spending its light on no one. Attention, I have come to believe, is the absorbing surface of a life. The year showers everyone alike, rich and poor, calm and frantic, with roughly the same photons, the same honey moons and market mornings and rain. What differs, wildly, from person to person and from January to December, is how much of it lands. A distracted year is a mirror, everything arriving, everything bouncing. A present year is a leaf.

This year, the table says, I was a leaf more often than I have ever been. The February morning the almond trees went off like slow fireworks. The June evening the anger passed through without breaking anything. A trampoline, a courtyard, a guitar coming into tune, the balcony resolving its old riddle at last. The instruments, as I wrote when they were still recalibrating, have recalibrated: ordinary light registers now. The ten minutes each morning turn out to be exactly what they always claimed to be, not a retreat from the day but a rehearsal for it, attendance practice, ten minutes of learning to stay where you are so that later, when the almond trees go off, somebody is home.

The inventory is not all gold, an honest audit never is. There are thin photographs, days the old weather ran the camera. They get counted too, without ceremony, the way an astronomer logs clouds: conditions, not verdicts.

Then I chose the twelve best cards and stood them along the bookshelf, a year of light, absorbed and banked, where the winter can see it.

Try the ritual, if December finds you near a printer. Spread your year on a table. Ask each picture the auditor's question. Whatever the count, it is not a judgment. It is a baseline, and attention, alone among the year's currencies, compounds: every year of this I get measurably richer, on exactly the same income of light.

The solstice is in two days. From there, the mornings brighten, one minute at a time, as if someone, very slowly, patiently, kindly, were turning the dimmer back up.

Be there for it. That is the whole resolution. Be there for it.