Questions We Walk With: Madrid
Is This Still Who I Am?
I walked El Retiro this morning before the city woke up.
Madrid in the early hours is a different city than the one most people experience. The park was quiet. A few runners passed without speaking. An older man fed pigeons beside the lake with the deliberateness of someone who has been doing it for thirty years. The morning light filtered through the trees with that particular quality it gets in July—golden and serious at the same time, as if the day itself were inviting you to pay attention.
I've spent many mornings in Madrid over the past few years. Some had a purpose. Others were simply walks between where I had been and wherever the day might lead. But the ones I remember most are mornings like this: walking without a destination, carrying a question that has stayed with me long after I first heard it.
Is this still who I am?
It is a deceptively simple question. Not dramatic. Not urgent. It doesn't usually arrive during a crisis. More often, it appears in the middle of an ordinary morning while you're walking through a park, sitting at a desk you've occupied for years, or watching life continue exactly as it always has. It asks whether the life you've built still reflects the person you're becoming. Or perhaps, more honestly, is the life you've built still the life your soul wants to live?
Most people who eventually find themselves drawn to the Camino de Santiago can't fully explain why. They talk about adventure, challenge, or the need for a break. They say a friend walked it and came home different. They watched a documentary. They reached a milestone birthday. Those reasons are real, but I suspect something quieter is happening beneath them. Long before someone decides to walk across Spain, a question has already begun walking beside them.
I didn't first hear this question in Madrid. I first encountered it years earlier while walking across northern Spain on the Camino. Since then it has followed me through Miami, Mexico City, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Asunción, and back again. It no longer feels like a question I'm trying to answer. It feels more like a companion that keeps revealing itself in different ways depending on where I am and who I am becoming.
That's one of the reasons I began Come Walk With Me. Not because cities provide answers—they rarely do—but because walking with a question in an unfamiliar place changes the conversation. When we leave behind our routines, our responsibilities, and the identity we've carefully constructed, something begins to loosen. Movement creates space. New places interrupt old patterns. In that space, we sometimes hear something we couldn't hear before.
This morning El Retiro didn't give me an answer. It simply invited me to keep walking with it.
I walked for nearly two hours without arriving at any conclusion. Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to solve the question and simply carried it. Once I stopped trying to answer it, I began noticing things I might otherwise have missed: the man feeding pigeons, the way the morning light moved across the path, a couple sitting on a bench sharing a silence that must have taken years to earn, and a child running toward the lake with the complete commitment that only children seem capable of.
None of those moments answered my question. All of them deepened it.
I don't know what question you're carrying today. It may be the same one that brought me to El Retiro this morning, or it may be something entirely different. What I have learned, however, is that the most important questions in our lives rarely arrive demanding immediate answers. They arrive as invitations—quiet invitations to pay closer attention, to notice what we have overlooked, and to keep walking long enough for something within us to begin changing.
If this question stays with you after you've finished reading, don't rush to resolve it. Take it with you on your next walk. Let it accompany you through an ordinary morning. You may discover, as I have, that the value of a good question is not that it tells us where to go, but that it changes the way we see the road beneath our feet.
Come walk with me.
Michael Rucker
Madrid, Spain
Camino Más Allá