Gratitude Journal

Kind of late writing about 2021 reflections but, there is this one habit in 2021 that I really like to share!

I have to admit that starting from 2020 till today, I really had no new year resolutions. Don’t really know whether it is a good or bad thing, but maybe I started to feel like whatever happens, happens. Whatever doesn’t happen, it is probably because of the virus. Since then, I had a more simple and focused to daily life planning. With that being said, I thought maybe I should get a cute planner that has a bigger daily format space. Then, another (silly) problem came up, what do I do with the monthly format? It is too small to fill in daily activities but it is bothering me if it is left empty. That’s when I decided to do my own kind of gratitude journal where I fill the little boxes on the monthly format every day with things I’m grateful for that day. At first it was an exciting thing to do. Almost everyday, I had something to be grateful for that day. In fact, it is something I look forward each and every day. Throughout the day, if something good happens, I would be looking forward to write it in my gratitude journal. Days aren’t always good, sometimes a day goes by with nothing to be proud of. Just the usual daily routine, or maybe I’ll be too tired and lazy to open the gratitude journal and write something. That’s when some days I was just kind of “forced” to write something just for the sake of filling the boxes (I hate to see empty spaces/incomplete things). I didn’t know what to write so I just wrote something random that made me slightly happy during the day. Worst, when I had a busy week, I just skip the weekdays and fill in the boxed on weekends just by the faint memory of how the week went.

As I looked back to the boxed I filled, it was the simple ones (the ones where I was forced to write) that actually made me smile and happy. It goes something like “bought martabak with 60% discount”, “workout went well” to “grateful of myself”. When I wrote those “forced” ones, I really didn’t think that it would also matter and made me happy as much as the “not forced” ones.

As much as earning my bachelor’s degree is something to be grateful for, discovering a great discography from an artist is also something to be grateful for, even if it is simple and effortless, but it completed the 2021 grateful boxes.