Caminante, son tus huellas el camino y nada más.
Machado wrote this during one of the most painful stretches of his life, after the death of his young wife Leonor in 1912. He was teaching in a small Spanish town, grieving, and had no clear sense of what came next. The line insists that the path does not exist before you walk it — which means you cannot plan your way into certainty, you can only move forward and trust that the moving is enough.
Reflection
Many of us wait for clarity before we act, treating uncertainty as a problem to solve first. What is one decision you have been postponing until you feel more sure?