My prayer my intention for this Camino has been to find the way. My whole life I have been a seeker a restless soul who is never content with the ways things are Always on the lookout for the next best thing– a better job, a better neighborhood, a better everything. Always on the quest to self improve. While pushing oneself for excellence is not a bad thing in itself, alas the search can be exhausting. It comes with a cost. I can never be happy anywhere.
As I was walking the Camino, however, I had a flash of insight. As picturesque as the rural villages of Galicia ,as chic and dapper the Europeans, I want to return home. Through the daily monotony of pushing through one more step– the lighting flash of pain across the midsection, the nagging woodpecker tapping in my right hip bone, what with thirst and hunger and dread that I might wind up dead at the side of a ravine–the purpose was to find the joy in the struggle. I am fine where I am. My career, a humble one, did not manifest in the wild adventures in my imagination. I chose to be a mother to two girls first and foremost.
What is most valuable in life might just be the simple ordinary acts of duty done day in day out for others. They might not be the fantastical breaks with monotonous quotidian existence—not the wanderlust expeditions or the flights into the unknown that keep us going through the same thing, day after day, just so we can reach the destination to let go of the daily grind. It is the grueling accumulation of step by step that leads to the next rest stop, the days we grumble about things hurting and the boredom of staying still —it is these steps that enrichen the beauty of the Way.
What the Camino has revealed to me is the settling of my fitful fancies. I have come to accept the roads I have taken, whether ill or well, as part of the grand landscape that brought me here. After decades of kicking against the liminal antechamber of “where do I live/what do I do,” a peace alighted on me. “You are fine wherever you are. Blessed wherever you dwell, good whatever you do as long as you do what is moral and what is close to your heart. The what matters less than the how. “
It is the simple care taken to choose where to put the foot next, one foot and then another. I must stop torturing myself with If only, should have, why didn’t you.
The Camino whispered to me that your life is the one you left behind, not the one you are trying to escape from. Cities might change, some more pretty than others, but it is how you feel in your own skin, how you carry yourself and what you tell yourself inscrutably that creates the path.
I came to the Camino looking to find a new path and wouldn’t you know, it pointed back to where I started. “Go sit in your cell,” Abba Moses the Black advised, “and your cell will teach you everything.” I have gained a deeper appreciation for where I live and what I do on this Camino. The answer of where to go, where to move to, paradoxically is this—where you are is where you are. The lesson I learned on the Camino is to value the place you stand on. The journey is a full circle after all.
I teach something on this theme to my students when training them for their literary analysis essays: “A (wo)man travels the whole world over looking for something and returns home to find it.” The Camino has shared its wisdom with me—to be content you must find value and meaning in the very place you are trying to escape.
The Lord probably meant the same thing when He preached that the only way to Him was through the Cross. It is the human thing to do to curse our troubled teen, to wish our overbearing boss could crawl under a hole, to wish the black dots on our lungs are not cancer. The things we wish to be free off—it is these very things, the crosses, the thorns in our sides, the stumbling stones, the hills that bring meaning to our life. Perhaps these are the very stuff that make up our life. Wanting to escape Life, only makes things excruciatingly more painful.
It is when I accept that I cannot undo my past, that my decisions are part of me, that I will watch my mother wither away and die, that I will die, it is when I accept all these Crosses that I have embraced life.
It is through the agony of every step burdened with two heavy backpacks and my internal eternal baggage walking on the Way that I can transfigure my life and make it worthwhile.
On the Camino I felt the yearning to go home—near those dysfunctional people I have so wanted to escape, to the monotony of a thankless underpaid job I chose because I was too scared to venture into something more challenging, to the frenetic city so full of despondency and madness. I went on the Camino asking for direction and in its wisdom it told me I do not have to go anywhere. I have to learn to find meaning in the place I live in the things I do on a daily basis and not to yearn and clamor for receding horizons. I must trust that things will unravel in God’s good time.
So be it. I am accepting the answer. I am enduring. What I was looking for was right under my feet all along. I had to take a journey of over 200,000 steps to realize it.
Today Monday, February 28th I have walked 106.25 miles equivalent to 170 kilometers.
