How Personal Can Dreams Be?

I always emphasize that one should have a dream to succeed in learning a foreign language or achieving a goal.
For example, you are learning a foreign language; so you should have a vision about it. You should envision yourself understanding or speaking the language correctly and fluently in a meeting or at an occasion. Also, you can just imagine yourself enjoying the language itself. The main thing is that you should see yourself somewhere, doing something with the language. The vision you have can be linked to the language indirectly or directly. The bottom line is that you should a vision, a motion picture on your mind.

Recently, to refresh my memory and my vision, I have asked to myself: “What is your dream related to your work and endless effort? I can see that I have many dreams. But one of them sounds remarkably interesting and exciting: To be able to go somewhere whenever I feel like doing so. The destination may be somewhere in Turkiye-my homeland or abroad. For Example, in Doğu Beyazıt, Edirne, Sarajevo, Moscow, Beijing, Arabian Deserts or Turkic Republics can be my destinations.

Have I never done such a thing? Yes I have. I enjoyed many cities in Turkiye and abroad; Shanghai, Paris, Brussel and so on. I am thankful for that. However, I have not done it by saying “I’ll have sone tea-coffe in Paris, Malaysia or China. I have visited many countries and cities. But the trips all have been on business to do translating for businessmen.

Then I shared this vision with a friend of mine and he said that this sounded very selfish! I said “OK listen to the rest!” and I told him the whole thing:
For me to go to another city and have some coffee is not a matter of a return ticket and some money. It requires lots of preparation. Yes I want to go to a city, read, write poetry or meet friends and this picture looks very self-oriented. But it requires very hard work and infrastructure related to my family and beloved ones. Just return tickets and some cash to spend there is the not the key. There is the other side of the medal and it looks like this:

To enable myself to go to another city freely depends on their happiness and being happy with me. So I must take them abroad, meet their expectations and help them to make their dreams come true. While I sit in a café and write, read or meet friends, I must know that my family and beloved ones are happy and they miss me. I must know that they do not envy me or are not angry with me. As a son, a brother, a father or a husband, they must be happy with me and believe that what I do is something I deserve. Otherwise, leaving people in anger and jealousy, I cannot enjoy anything personal. Neither reading a nice book nor having a nice cup of tea will make happy and relaxed.

To sum up, my innocent dream cannot depend on a return ticket and some cash. I am already able to do this. Sometimes the basement is more expensive than the building itself. My story is the same.
After I told the whole thing to my friend, he said: “You are right! Your dream is not a self-oriented one!”

I am not the age of leaving people unhappy and jealous behind and just chasing after my dreams, which I never complain about. I just want to see happy faces and embracing people on my return.

By the way, I always write about reading and writing. Nowadays, I have a lot of students and friend in many cities. I would like to meet them and talk the old days. It would be fun!

I expect too much? Do not be afraid: I expect from God, not from you!