Standing in Madrid’s Plaza de España, looking at Don Quixote sitting on Rocinante beneath the monument to Cervantes, I found myself thinking again about why this strange old knight has stayed with me for so many years.

He is, after all, ridiculous.

He sees windmills and believes they are giants.

He sees an ordinary world and insists on turning it into something grander.

An inn becomes a castle. An innkeeper becomes a nobleman.

And in Man of La Mancha, Aldonza — a woman who has been treated badly and sees very little worth in herself — becomes, in Quixote’s eyes, Dulcinea, a woman of dignity and beauty.

Sometimes this is absurd. Sometimes it is dangerous.

But occasionally it raises a much more uncomfortable question:

What if seeing people and the world not only as they are, but as they might become, has value of its own?

That is where Don Quixote gets complicated.

The windmills are the famous example. Everyone else sees windmills. Don Quixote sees enormous giants threatening the countryside and charges them with his lance.

He is spectacularly wrong.

But the windmills are only one part of a much larger dream.

Don Quixote believes he can bring back an age of chivalry. He wants to defend the helpless, right wrongs, fight injustice, protect honor and somehow make the world a nobler place.

That is the dream that Man of La Mancha turned into its great anthem: to keep reaching for something that reason tells you may be unreachable.

And I cannot dismiss that.

In fact, the older I get, the more I seem to admire it.

Why?

I think it has something to do with the uncomfortable line between foolishness and idealism.

Most of us are taught to be realistic.

See the world as it is.

Know your limitations.

Do not confuse what you hope is true with what actually is true.

All sensible advice.

But there is another side to that.

If everyone accepts the world exactly as it is, nothing much changes.

Someone has to imagine something different.

Someone has to attempt something that looks improbable.

Someone has to be willing, occasionally, to look foolish.

That is what makes Don Quixote so hard to dismiss.

He is wrong about the windmills.

But is he wrong to believe that life should contain courage, purpose, adventure and ideals?

That question means more to me now than it did when I was younger.

As we get older, the messages around us subtly begin to change.

Be careful.

Slow down.

Be realistic.

You have done enough.

Leave the adventures to someone younger.

Don Quixote rejects all of that.

He is not young when he sets out.

He does not decide that the interesting part of life is behind him.

He climbs onto a horse and goes looking for adventure.

Yes, he gets knocked down.

Quite a lot.

But he gets back up.

There is something about that I find increasingly moving.

Not because I want to mistake windmills for giants.

Not because every impossible dream should be pursued.

And certainly not because reality does not matter.

It does.

But perhaps there is a danger in becoming too realistic.

Maybe growing older should make us wiser about which windmills are actually giants.

It should not necessarily make us stop riding toward them.

That may be why Don Quixote still gets to me.

More now, perhaps, than ever.

I know the windmills are windmills.

I just don’t think that means we should stop riding toward them.