WHAT DO YOU HAVE TODAY THAT YOU ONCE DESPERATELY WANTED? – On dreams we have grown accustomed to.
Sometimes I wonder how many things that are now part of my life once seemed completely out of reach.
The places I find myself in today. The freedom I experience. The opportunity to travel, meet people, discover the world and create something that truly means something to me.
I used to dream about these things.
Today, I simply wake up in the morning and live.
And perhaps that is where a certain paradox lies. We can spend years desperately wanting something, only to stop noticing its significance once it finally becomes part of our everyday lives.
We get used to it.
To places we once read about with wonder. To the freedom we once longed for. To the presence of people whose company once seemed like an extraordinary kind of happiness.
And yet, not so long ago, we might have given so much just to be exactly where we are today.
Porto. The place where I first thought: I would love to live like this.
Around sixteen years ago, I found myself in Portugal for the first time, in Porto. I was there as a university student on an Erasmus exchange.
I remember that time as a moment when I discovered something much bigger than a new city or another country on the map.
I saw a world that felt beautiful, open and full of possibilities. Different cultures, people, ways of living and everyday experiences that could look completely different from the life I had known.
And I remember thinking:
I would love to live like this.
Back then, I had no idea what that life would actually look like. I didn’t know the path that might lead me there. I didn’t know whether I would ever be able to afford such a life.
It was more of a dream than a realistic plan.
Porto became more than a memory from my student exchange. It was the first glimpse of a thought that perhaps life could be different. That the world was bigger than I had imagined. That there were places, people and experiences capable of opening up an entirely new perspective.
And today?
Today, I am in Asia.
I travel, meet people and discover new places. I create projects that are close to my heart. I am developing C.U.D. Experience. I am building Shades of Human Life — a space for conversations about what connects us, regardless of where we come from, what language we speak or what our stories look like.
I am living a journey that once felt like a distant dream.
And it is not that everything looks exactly as I imagined it would. Life rarely unfolds according to the plans we once wrote for ourselves.
It is about something else.
That the young man in Porto, looking at the world with wonder and thinking that he would love to live like this, is now, in a way, living that very life.
Sometimes I wish he could see where I am today.
And that, for a moment, he wouldn’t think about everything he still needed to achieve.
That he would simply smile.
When the dream was simply to live.
There is another moment in my life that I look back on with a very different kind of gratitude.
The time when I was ill.
Some experiences change our perspective for a long time. Suddenly, things that once seemed important lose their significance. Plans, ambitions, the next goals we want to reach — everything can move into the background.
Because when health and life are no longer something we can take for granted, our dreams can become surprisingly simple.
You want to live.
You want more time. To see more places. Meet people. Experience an ordinary day. Wake up in the morning with another chance ahead of you.
We don’t always know how to appreciate these things when they seem guaranteed.
But they aren’t.
Today, I am still here. I am alive. I travel, create, discover the world and meet people. I have more plans, ideas and dreams ahead of me.
And although not every day is perfect, I am increasingly able to recognise how much has already happened.
Not because I forget the difficult moments. Not because everything was easy.
But because I know that simply being here, having the opportunity to experience another day and decide what to do with the time I have, is not something to treat as an obvious certainty.
Once, I dreamed of being alive.
Today, I sometimes have to remind myself that this is exactly what I am doing.
How quickly we grow accustomed to our own dreams.
It is remarkable how the human mind works.
We can spend months, sometimes years, imagining how wonderful it would be to have something that is now within our reach.
We dream of freedom, and then treat it as everyday life.
We dream of travelling, and later find ourselves complaining about being tired, a delayed flight or yet another day of packing our bags.
We dream of creating our own project, and once we begin, we focus mainly on everything that isn’t working yet.
We dream of a more peaceful life, and when a moment of peace finally arrives, we immediately look for the next goal.
As if a fulfilled dream came with a very short expiration date.
At first, there is excitement. The feeling that something extraordinary has happened. That we have reached a place we once could only imagine.
Then everyday life takes over.
And what once felt extraordinary becomes normal.
There is nothing wrong with that. Getting used to things is part of being human. We cannot experience everything with the same intensity as we did the very first time.
The problem begins when we stop noticing that our version of “normal” was once our own greatest dream.
When we look only at what we still don’t have, it becomes easy to overlook everything we have already built.
But life is not made up solely of the next peaks we need to climb.
Sometimes, it is worth looking around from the place we have already reached.
Not everything has to be bigger, farther or more.
We live in a world that constantly gives us new reasons to want more.
More travel. More money. More success. More experiences. More proof that our lives are moving in the right direction.
And of course, dreams matter. Goals can give our lives direction. The desire to grow can be a beautiful force.
I still have many things I want to do. Places I want to see. Projects I want to develop. Stories I would love to discover and tell.
I don’t want to stop dreaming.
I simply want to remember that achieving the next dream should not be a condition for my happiness.
I don’t have to wait until C.U.D. Experience reaches every planned milestone to appreciate what I am already creating.
I don’t have to see every place in the world to feel grateful for the places I have already been.
I don’t need answers to every question to enjoy what is happening right now.
You can want more and still be grateful for what you already have.
You can have ambitions without treating your own life as a project that constantly needs improvement.
You can keep moving forward without diminishing the journey you have already travelled.
Try looking at your life through the eyes of your former self.
Sometimes I think it would be worth meeting the person I was ten or fifteen years ago.
Not to tell him about every achievement. Not to prove that everything worked out.
But rather to ask:
Do you remember what you used to dream about?
Do you remember how much you wanted to see the world?
Do you remember what you were afraid of and what seemed beyond your reach?
And then show him an ordinary day from my life today.
Not an extraordinary trip. Not a major achievement. Not a perfectly planned moment.
Just a day.
The place where I wake up. The people I meet. The projects I work on. The freedom to choose where I go and what I do next.
And perhaps that is when I would understand that not everything meaningful has to look like a spectacular success.
Sometimes, a fulfilled dream doesn’t arrive with a fanfare.
Sometimes, it is simply your Tuesday.
An ordinary morning in a place you once dreamed of.
A conversation with someone you would never have met if you hadn’t set out on the journey.
The opportunity to create something that, just a few years ago, seemed like nothing more than an idea.
Or another day in which you are simply here.
Gratitude doesn’t mean you stop dreaming.
I am not writing this to say that we should settle for what we have and stop wanting more.
I don’t believe gratitude and ambition have to contradict each other.
Quite the opposite.
I think we can dream boldly while learning to recognise how many of our former dreams have already become reality.
We can have a long road ahead of us and still appreciate the place where we are.
We can want new experiences without forgetting the ones that have already shaped us.
For me, gratitude doesn’t mean that everything in life is perfect.
It means being able to recognise its value even when things don’t go the way I hoped.
It means remembering Porto.
Remembering the time when all I dreamed of was simply being alive.
Being able to look at the journey I am on today and think:
This, too, was once just a dream.
And perhaps that is why I try to notice these moments. I don’t want to move through my own life so quickly that I only realise years later how many beautiful things happened along the way.
I don’t want to keep waiting for the next chapter and forget that I am already reading one I once dreamed of.
And you? What do you have today that you once desperately wanted?
Maybe it is the freedom you once dreamed of.
Maybe it is the home you were searching for.
Maybe it is the relationship you waited a long time for.
Maybe it is the work you once wanted to do.
Or perhaps it is something much simpler.
Peace. Health. The chance to wake up another day. Time for yourself. People around whom you can be yourself.
You don’t need a life that looks like a fulfilled dream from the outside.
You only need to pause sometimes and notice how many things that seem ordinary today once meant so much to you.
Maybe you don’t need another dream to feel happy.
Maybe you need to remember, for a moment, the ones that have already come true.
Because perhaps one of the most beautiful moments in life is not the moment when you achieve something new.
It is the moment when you finally recognise how far you have come.
And you are able to say:
Thank you. I am here.
And that truly means a lot.
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