Don't Give Up on Dreams Just Because They Are Big

A long time ago I pictured myself going trekking in Nepal.

It did not last long. I threw it away almost immediately, because I was too fat and it was obvious to me that it was impossible. Not hard, not far off — impossible.

That is the fastest way a person gets rid of dreams. They do not even think one through properly and already know it is not for them. They do not even have to fail at it. It is enough never to let the dream into their head at all.

The hanger

I took the first of these photos on 12 November 2023. In it there is a wooden medal hanger and one single medal — from a five-kilometre race in Zakopane, my first.

Seven empty rows and one ribbon.

I bought it right after that race. I was beautifully fired up and I knew it would keep going. A medal hanger when you own one medal is a fairly cheeky gesture — but back then I had exactly the kind of enthusiasm in which such things get done.

I had it engraved: Don't give up on dreams just because they are big.

I no longer know whether I found it somewhere or thought of it myself. Probably thought of it.

What matters is when I wrote it down. Not at the end, when there is something to show. At the beginning, when it was still entirely open and nobody — not even me — knew whether anything would ever be added to that hanger.

Dreams I never dreamed

The second photo is from this morning.

But what happened between those two photos is not about the number of medals.

When I started doing sport, dreams began opening up that I had never dreamed before. That is the strange part — it is not that I longed for something and it would not come. It simply never occurred to me.

That I would run? Me? That was not a discarded dream. That was a thing so far outside me that it does not even get dreamed.

Nepal was the only notion I allowed myself back then, and even that I threw away within a few seconds. Everything else I have lived through since arrived without my having dreamed of it in advance.

I write about it several times in the book. There is considerably more of it.

And now the part that belongs with it

Right now I am not running.

I did not finish my last half-marathon in June. For health reasons — what exactly happened I write about in the book and will not go into here. The doctors told me to take at least a month off completely.

I took it. Then came the holidays. And then the writing of the book got going in earnest, and with it the family, the music school, the gym — and running simply did not fit in among all that.

I did not stop moving. I have the gym four times a week, I go to the mountains, in winter I get into ice water. What dropped out was running, not everything.

Every now and then I still go for a run with my girlfriend or on my own. Not regularly. And every few weeks I tell myself that from now on it is for real — and nothing ever comes of it.

I am writing this here because it is exactly the type of sentence people think and do not write, because it sounds like failure. I have no neat point to make out of it.

Why the motto stays

Because it is not about medals.

It is about a dream not being thrown away on account of its size — and about the best things having come to me at a time when I was not even dreaming of them.

The hanger stays on the wall the way it is. Seven years back it would not have been hanging there at all.