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This April, when I was in the final stages of preparation before leaving for France and Spain to walk the 800-kilometre Camino de Santiago, my sister-in-law sent me a text saying she hoped it would change me. That’s not exactly the way she put it, but I got the message. Frankly, I hoped it would, too.
I had been drawn to the Camino for years but didn’t act until my wife turned to me last summer and said, “What are you waiting for? Get on with it.” In my state of semi-retirement, I could find the required six weeks if I wanted it badly enough, so I did.
Unlike some Camino pilgrims, I did not have a clear purpose in mind. I felt I needed an answer, for myself and others, about why I was doing it, so I described it as a combination of feeding intellectual curiosity, enduring physical challenge and creating plenty of room for reflection (spiritual or otherwise). The Camino provided all of these in abundance.
Within an hour of starting the first day of my walk, I felt something unfamiliar wash over me. At first, I thought it was just the joy of finally being there after months of preparation, but it was something more lasting than that. It was a sense of cleansing or detoxification that came with having hours with the sole purpose of walking the 20 to 30 km to the next stop.
On July 1, this English hamlet remembers Canada quite fondly
Other pilgrims felt it too. It was as if all the distractions and demands on our time and attention that existed in our regular lives had been pushed outside of the bubble we each now inhabited. Those things were still out there, but they would have to wait. Inside the bubble, we had all the time and space we needed to focus on the moment at hand and whatever thoughts we chose to entertain. It was like practicing mindfulness seven or eight hours a day.
Although I usually chose to walk alone (I never ate alone), I often found myself in lockstep with others for periods of time. One was a brilliant young woman named Christine from Munich who had just submitted her doctoral thesis and was walking to clear her head and contemplate what came next in her life. Over the course of three days, we had some of the most interesting conversations about life, work, healthy living and purpose. Thinking back on it a couple of days later, I realized that I brought up my late father in many of those conversations. For some reason, something about him, his life and work provided an insight or relevant lesson for the topic at hand.
My dad and I had a close relationship and I quietly admired how he approached life and work – never taking anything too seriously, but always getting the job done. When he died a few years ago at 89, it was sad, but at that age, not tragic. I dealt with it the same way I did everything. I did not pause to reflect or process his passing, but immediately turned my attention to what had to be done next: writing the obituary, planning the celebration of life, helping my mother sort out estate matters, etc., etc.
In retrospect, I realized that I let my obsession with productivity – a point of pride throughout my life – eclipse what should have been a poignant time of reflection and appreciation. It took the Camino to help me understand this.
The song that brings my wife back from the fog of Alzheimer’s
A couple of days after Christine and I had parted ways, I found myself walking alone. No one was in view ahead of or behind me. It was a beautiful setting and I followed advice from another pilgrim to every now and then stop, look up and look back.
As I did this, I thought of those many conversations with Christine and finally truly processed the loss of my father. I was overcome with emotion and felt as if something that had been trapped inside me now had room to escape. Living in that moment meant there was nothing standing in the way of those emotions. I bawled like an exhausted toddler for 10 minutes. I felt a combination of relief and joy after that.
They say, “the Camino provides,” but I did not understand what that meant until it provided me with a lesson in living in the moment and making room to appreciate something that had been so important to me. Whether this has changed me or if the change sticks is a question perhaps only my sister-in-law can answer.
Peter Fardy lives in Halifax.