The Someday List: How to Dream About Italy Without the Guilt

Most of us have one, even if it's never been written down: the someday list. The 'someday Italy' folder. The trip we'll take when there's time, the place we'll see when the moment is right, the life we'll slow down into eventually. We tend to feel faintly guilty about it — as if dreaming of a someday we haven't yet reached is a kind of failure, or a distraction from getting on with things.

It isn't. The dreaming is not the consolation prize. Done right, it's one of the quiet pleasures of a life, and worth keeping on purpose.

Why dreaming is not a waste

Psychologists who study happiness keep finding the same thing: anticipation is one of the most reliable sources of joy we have — often greater than the experience itself. The weeks of imagining a trip, picturing the light and the long lunches, can hold as much pleasure as the trip itself. To dream of Italy on a gray Tuesday is not to fail to be in Italy; it's to give an ordinary day a thread of gold.

This is the same instinct behind la dolce far niente — the understanding that not everything has to be useful to be worthwhile. The dreaming itself is the product.

The guilt to let go of

The thing to release is the sense that a desire unfulfilled is a reproach. We've absorbed the idea that wanting something we don't yet have is a problem to be solved or a failure to be ashamed of. But longing, held lightly, is just a sign of being alive to the world's possibilities. You're allowed to want the trip, the slower life, the someday — and to enjoy the wanting — without it being a stick to beat yourself with. That permission is the heart of why a slower, more intentional life has become the real luxury.

How to keep a someday list

Keep it like a pleasure, not a project:

• Write down what genuinely lights you up — the specific village, the cooking class, the morning swim — not what you think you *should* want.
• Return to it for joy. Open it on a hard day to dream, not to feel behind. It's a garden, not a deadline.
• Keep it alive. Add a clipping, a photo, a line from something you read. Let it grow as you do.

From someday to sooner

And here is the gentle magic: written-down dreams have a way of quietly coming true. Not because of any mysticism, but because clarity shapes choices. When you know what you're dreaming toward, you start — almost without noticing — making small decisions that bend life in its direction. The someday list becomes a someday *plan*, the kind we walk through in How to Plan a Trip That Changes You, and the trip you'll finally take in the unhurried spirit of slow travel after fifty.

So dream, and dream without guilt. Keep your someday list, return to it often, and enjoy the dreaming for exactly what it is — not a failure to have arrived, but one of the sweetest parts of the journey there.