To end the year, I want to tell you about a small but very powerful habit that I started consistently in 2016 and has been incorporated into my life ever since. If you haven’t done it yet, you’ll be surprised. Here’s the story…

I saw a video by Flavia Melissa and immediately liked her. I identify with the things she says. And at the time she was doing a 21-day #odesafiodagratidão. I thought it was a great idea and followed Flavia’s 21 days, which were already halfway through. Some time later, she started mobilizing people on the internet to do the same challenge, but for 300 days. And that’s when I said: I’ll do it!

I don’t remember exactly when the challenge started, but I remember (more or less) that it ended on March 23, 2015. The challenge was to post something you were grateful for with the hashtag #desafiodagratidão2015. Well, I started, but I didn’t finish =(

I didn’t have facebook, so I took part on instagram, and I found it hard to post something every day. It was hard to choose a photo that matched what you wanted to thank lol (you can see some random photos from the challenge on my instagram).

I must have done it for less than a month, I think. Well, I was out of that challenge. However, I still followed the posts of the people who were taking part. Finally, 2015 arrived and that’s when I moved to NZ.

A girl who was taking an English course with me showed up one day with a small notebook, one of those cute little Japanese-style ones full of blank pages, and I asked her where she’d bought it. She, a delicate Japanese girl, wrote down the English words translated into Japanese in the notebook and told me that she had bought it at the R$1.99 store here.

The notebook shouldn’t have cost me more than $2 (I love stationery, especially Japanese stationery, I buy it, but sometimes I don’t even know what I buy it for). I got the notebook because it was cute lol, but I didn’t know what I was going to use it for.

I don’t know why I brought the notebook with me on vacation at the end of last year either. But that’s when an idea came to me. I was going to do the gratitude challenge again every day for a year. I would have 365 reasons to be grateful in 2016. And I did.

I took my notebook everywhere with me. We went to the forest several times and I kept the notebook in my bag. I traveled to Brazil and Chile and the notebook was in my suitcase. And at home it was on the bedside table every day.

Now we’re coming to the end and I have one more day to complete my gratitude challenge. I’m very excited to write for the last time in the little notebook that has accompanied me for a year and holds all my blessings. What will my heart be grateful for on the last day? Maybe I’ll thank the girl who showed up with her English notebook, or I’ll thank the day I bought the notebook, or Flavia Melissa who came up with the idea for the challenge.

The truth is that it doesn’t matter, because it won’t be the last day of my life that I give thanks. I’ve been immensely blessed this year, I dare say it’s been the best year of my life so far, I don’t know if it’s because I’ve only seen more blessings or because there have been so many lol. But the fact is: looking at life with a grateful heart completely changes your perspective.

Building purposes every day and even on those cloudy days when you can’t see anything to be thankful for, realizing that there’s always a little something there that you don’t see because it’s simply always there and seeing every day as a fresh start. And so, day after day, building a whole year that surpasses the year inside, and year after year building a life that will have been worthwhile.

I wish all of us the best year of our lives in 2017 and even if it doesn’t turn out that way, it’s okay because we know we’ll have 2018…

Happy New Year!

Gratitude today and always

Cha ☻