♥️ My weekly favorites#1
🚲 Amezawa pass in Aichi prefecture (雨沢峠). This is a really popular climb for road cyclists. About 7km long, not very steep but a lot of variations, I often have to shift gear as the incline varies a lot between 1% to 10%. But this time I felt pretty good, not as fast as I usually climb but I somehow particularly enjoyed it. The temperature was around 25 degrees and the wind was refreshing enough. The best part though was the downhill.🚀 I rarely climb up and down the same way as I prefer to make a proper loop but this time I somehow really wanted to. I have never enjoyed going downhill that much! It’s a winding road and I’m not the most confident cyclist but I managed to ride pretty fast, anticipating every turn and even started to get this weird feeling of becoming “one” with bike.😊
My “precious”: TCR ADVANCED 2 DISC KOM - Hematite. At the top of Amewaza pass. 
Rice fields after Amezawa pass. The rice planting season has started!
📖 Writing. My husband often told me about the benefits of writing but I never felt like this is something for me. At least not until January 2023, when I started writing down everyday a least three things that I was grateful for or that I enjoyed in my “daily positivity” notebook. It can be just a word, a sentence or a longer paragraph. The point is to focus on positive things, to “train my brain” to always look for positivity. I took this idea from the book of Shawn Achor: The happiness Advantage. Focusing on positive things can help us realize how “small” the negative ones are, how much they don't really matter eventually. It's still easy to go back to the old habit of seeing everything in black, but that state of mind doesn’t last as long as it used to. Thanks to writing, I started feeling better and step by step, I’m managing to retrain my brain to spot patterns of positivity. Now when I enjoy something, whatever small it may be, I immediately take a note to write it down in my notebook.🎉 I realized that this blog has similar effects, I'm excited to think about the next topic, what currently inspires me and even what I’m struggling with so that I can start working on a solution. This is FUN ❤️
📚 Start With Why. I started listening to the audiobook Start With Why, by Simon Sinek. My husband told me many times how important it is to ask “Why” for everything we do or want to do. It has been on my mind for a while but I never took the time to seriously think about it. Now that I’m on this “happiness journey”, I feel like every minute of every day counts even more than before. I want to engage in work or activities that truly matter, but for them to matter, I need to know why I want to commit to them. So I will start asking myself “why” for everything I do: “Why do I love road cycling?” “Why did I start my translation business?” “Why do I want to improve my Japanese language skills?”, “Why did I start learning Computer Science?”, etc. I start to understand to power of asking Why and I'm looking forward to finding out more about myself.
Camille.