15 Days to Freedom New Year Blog Challenge: Day 15 – FINALE! The daily challenge I like the most

Day 15 – the daily challenge I like the most!

Whoooooow I made it! I made it!!!

I didn’t always made it through a blogging challenge, even ones I set myself (ough!) so this is quite special. Even more special because I had to deal with several days of internet trouble in the middle of the challenge *BIG SMILE*

And now for the last challenge, I have to look back and see which daily challenge I like most and why.

Hmm…it’s quite difficult. I love each and every challenge because it was the sequence and the momentum building that energized me day by day with every blog post I had to write.

But if you ask me about the ‘aha’ moment, I would say the day 14 challenge:

Day 14 – I’m forever a tourist in my own town, and I love it!

Aha moment?

Yes!

I remember I really had fun writing about my own experience being an ‘everyday tourist’ where I live in Jakarta, but not only that.

In the morning after publishing the blog post the night before, a colleague told me she had read my entire #15DBC posts “this morning on the way to work on the train”.”And now I think I understand how you can be such a happy person – you have that daily me-time adventure, like a tourist, a lot!”

Haha! I admit I’m not a happy person all the time but yes, I think I mostly have a happy mood, perhaps sometimes too much. I remember some friends from abroad said I got happy too easily, I laughed when Jakarta was flooded and the house where I lived got 2 meter water inside, my housemates and I had to stay on the balcony for 4 days, and according to those guys, it’s not real. Another friend questioned whether I got injected with a “happy vaccine” when I was baby.

While so far I thought it was normal :D Many Indonesians are just…like me. We get used to the fact that life is not always easy, and we tend to laugh a lot in order to cope.

Thanks to my parents. Especially my late dad, who taught me – since I was little – to ‘play’ with my own mind and enjoy what we have. Life was hard for an artist at that time, we couldn’t afford travels (even having beef rendang for dinner was a luxury – now I can buy beef rendang for breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday if I want!) so he often took me for a walk around the city, playing travel game where we visited Rome, Vienna, Monza, Geneva…when actually we went to walk along the shopping street and passed by shops called Rome, Vienna, Monza and Geneva. We walked everywhere, or took the three wheeled bike called “becak” – because that’s how tourists went around our town. We had magical adventures, and I was a happy kid. Though there were times I was not a happy kid because my schoolmates thought I was talking nonsense. But my father was known as an eccentric artist so I had a reason to have weird stories, too :D

And now I realized I keep that habit with me – and I took it for granted. While I knew it was a valuable coping skill, I wasn’t fully aware that it could be as important as life goals or business strategy. How you see your everyday life is more or less the way you see the world, right? Keeping that “feel good’ is also very important for me, an artsy girl in the corporate world. I’m still on my way to the freedom life I dream about everyday, and on the road, I’d choose the view that propel me towards that dream life!

Thanks Natalie for this challenge! You rock!