The End of the Road
I'm done with the Camino. Fed up talking about it. It's time to reflect on what its actual effects have been - and move on to the next one
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I’m done with the Camino now.
Fed up talking about it.
Bored of it.
Over it.
When I got home I had dreams of learning Spanish, of moving to Spain and running my own albergue. Of going to live on the Camino so I could be learn everything there is to learn about it, to absorb the energy of it and its people and those who walk the road. Like every other place I’ve ever travelled to, whether Kyoto or Kiltimagh, I’ve pressed my face against the glass and wondered
“What would it be like to live here?”
This is what happens when you travel. Bitten by the bug, as they say. It’s a dangerous game to play, going off on a journey to mine your own soul for creative gold. In order to realise this end, you must lean into the parts of yourself that would burn down your house back at home in order to set you free. Routine and stagnation are poison to the creative spirit, or so it believes anyway.
In embracing the camaraderie of the Camino one bares all parts of their soul to the road, though it has the effect of scattering you all along it like breadcrumbs. Everyone you meet is a mirror which reflects the unconscious parts back to you, and there is collateral damage in gazing into the abyss.
This is why you must return home to back together those parts newly uncovered parts of yourself. The creative gold needs a solid foundation on which it may lie, a canvas to provide a boundary for it to exist and flourish. And one way to do this is the act of creating or building something. In my case it was putting my experience into words, writing and collecting a book’s worth of stories, essays and various other media.
For others, a simple return to the familiar routine might suffice.
I arrived home and inevitably, was already dreaming up the next one. On the final day, tempting conversations were had with the latest Camino friend – a gentleman from Thurles named Patrick. He was on his ninth Camino, this one seeming to be of indefinite duration as he took things as he came, carried little luggage, never made plans and gave himself time to get lost. He had plenty of stories and we chatted about all the ways you could do the Camino – no phone. No guidebook. As fast as you can. As slowly as possible. In a group. Alone. No luggage. Move to the Camino and open your own albergue. Walk only at night. Different times of year. And so on, and so forth.
You could walk forever – a different Camino for every year – I could write about it forever too.
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But eventually you have to stop walking, and stop writing. To put a full stop on your journey. The various stages of the journey are predictable, and reliable in their occurrence, though they’re all relative to the length of the greater journey. And the greater journey must have a defined beginning, middle and – most importantly – end. The story can only be told in retrospect, but it’s up to you to bring it to a conclusion. You’ll see then the scale of how far you’ve come, but only when you’ve moved on.
So what are the effects of a trip like the Camino? What does the journey actually do to you? I sensed parallels to challenges and retreats I’d undertaken in recent years – mountain marathons and meditation courses – that took the participants on comparable journeys. Different scales and time frames, though similar patterns of physical and mental challenges, and of course – spiritual results.
What are those outcomes? Well, it’s hard to say. Many people I’ve met, both on the Camino and elsewhere, have claimed the Camino has transformed their lives, or at the very least themselves. This is part of the lore of the Camino, passed down through generations. This is why I went there in the first place – I wanted to see what was up, and investigate how it worked.
Maybe it’s not for me to say if or how it’s ‘transformed’ me.
There are some things I’ve noticed though.
One is that it’s done much to increase my faith in humanity. Not that it had been depleted entirely, and maybe it was the isolating effects of lockdown that had taken its toll, but as my father said as we were dissecting our Camino experiences one evening over dinner (he’s a fellow Camino alumnus):
“You couldn’t not be a Christian after doing that”
It’s just how it is.
There’s presence, too, something often talked about but more often misunderstood.
One of the noticeable effects too of walking is when, after a few days or a couple of weeks, the days begin to dissolve and you become entirely focused on the present day. You might consider the one ahead sometimes – they often float into consciousness some time in the evening, or you hear some whisperings about a change in scenery or something to expect, or some other road-gossip. And fond memories of the previous day’s exertions linger on for a day or so too, though even the most epic of days is quickly processed and forgotten about, or at least integrated and internalised.
And so I found in the weeks after, I was equally content, and only thinking outside of the day at hand when I had to. There is much talk of ‘being present’ and mostly we don’t even understand what it means; it is something we tend to experience in glimpses, and it cannot be rationalised. On the Camino there is so much talk of it, everyone striving for it, pacing furiously and claiming they’ve found it, yet it’s only when we look away that we realise we’ve been experiencing it all along.
I can’t claim I’m always present now, though I’ve seen glimpses of it, and once you have tapped into these wavelengths and frequencies, they become places to aim for again in the future.
I found when I sat to write, it came much easier than I’d experienced in a long time. Again, wavelengths I knew of and had seen glimpses of, though was rarely able to maintain for too much consistent time.
I had a mission though, and the effect of writing and publishing at such a sustained level of effort for so long – 41 days, like the Camino – is that it reconditions your whole view of yourself. If it takes three weeks to form a habit, then six weeks it enough to burn all your habits and build a whole new you.
But this isn’t about habit building. It was easier from the moment I sat down. That’s what all the walking does to you. All that exposing yourself to the world. All that camaraderie and generosity of spirit. And all that walking yourself into the ground.
Your ‘self’ is nothing but a collection of your beliefs, and the pilgrimage – the journey – is the ritual destruction of these beliefs.
Destroy the old and rebuild the new.
Destroy those that hold you back and build the ones that would inspire you to your destination, whatever you choose that to be.
I sit to write now and I’m freer than ever.
I went looking for inspiration: partly in the form of a trip to write about, partly because I presumed one of the effects of the Camino or any bout of travel would be to shake up your mind a bit and help you see things in different ways – this isn’t a new idea about the effects of travel.
And it worked – though in which sense, I can’t say.
I think I already had the inspiration. Whatever ‘worked’ simply uncovered that forward inspiration and accelerated the destruction of that holding me back from the past.
When I began I had some vague ideas, notions, senses of possibilities that I could use this experience to further my writing career somehow. I’d at least put together a solid body of work and practice, some new readers might come across my blog or the stories and essays, lured in by their interest in the Camino and some clever hashtags. Come for the world-famous pilgrimage info, stay for the quality writing.
I’m sure that happened, somewhat, and thank you to those of you who fall into just that category, and have stuck around, as well of course, those of you who have been here since before that and continue to read and enjoy my work.
I realised about a week into the writing project though, that I didn’t give a damn about any of you.
If I cared about a hypothetical reader, I wouldn’t have been bombarding emails and social media feeds with one or two posts a day, filling allocated caption word counts, writing book chapter’s worth of material a day, indulging every half baked idea and putting every minor environmental detail I came across in writing, hitting send on hastily edited work and completely missing the spirit of high-paced video streaming platforms by spamming hours of content of mostly my talking head and nothing else.
These are not the actions of a man who cares about who is reading or watching.
Something happens along these journeys, creative and physical. And it happens more and more, and with greater fluency the further you continue. You can’t think too much about it while you’re travelling, or working, or whatever form your journey takes. Stories play out in our hearts. New ones get written, and in order to make way for them old ones get changed. The past can be rewritten.
When you commit to your destination then the only things that matter are those that get you there. And you lose sight of that which is holding you back.
And just like the road to Santiago forces the pilgrim into a state of being where all the things which might hinder their journey are abandoned – from excess luggage to personal baggage which might weigh the bearer down, to superfluous things like their concept of time, their inhibitions towards strangers and their very identity – so too the artist’s journey forces one to abandon that thing which is the death of creativity: fear.
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“You couldn’t not be a Christian after doing that”
That’s probably the most succinct description of why I’m in the faith I’ve come across in a long time. There are experiences I’ve had, like you’re describing, that rewrite yourself and leave you really without other options. Thanks for this beautiful piece.
“Lord, where else can we go?”