My very first thoughts about walking the Camino de Santiago occurred round about 1975 when there was an ‘awakening’ of the existence of Long Distance Footpaths (LDPs) as we call them in the UK. At that time in the UK there were only a small number of these, in total contrast to the situation in countries like France and Spain where such things abound. In 1975 there was a newish LDP known as the Pennine Way which is 271 miles in length (Yes, that IS a long way by British standards). My account of that walk is described in another blogs post. Suffice it to say that the lessons I learned from walking it had a huge impact upon the way that, many years later, I was to prepare for the Camino, both mentally and physically. I knew even back then that I would always want to do a very long walk such as the Camino de Santiago in its entirety, all in one go, so to speak. I never considered doing it as separate stages. The problem would always be finding the time (5 or 6 weeks) to do it this way. In the years that followed the Pennine Way I became more involved in mountaineering than just general walking. For many years the Camino de Santiago was nothing more than a distant aspiration lodged somewhere very much at the back of my mind. For a while it seemed that destiny was taking me on travels to higher things further afield, after a couple of years in the European Alps with my three mountaineering colleagues at that time. That was 1989, the same year that destiny was to send my path through life in an entirely new direction….one that unknown to myself at that time was to put me back on the path that made Santiago de Compostela a more realistic destination than Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro or the Himalayas. You see I went to Colombia, I learned Spanish, I got married and I had a daughter. Life changing stuff. No longer was high altitude mountaineering a feasible proposition as you have to very much dedicate heart, body and soul exclusively to it, in order to remain ‘superfit’. But I was always determined to remain active physically and mentally and you don’t necessarily have to climb Mt Everest to do that. I’m lucky as I have a coastline to run along which I did four or five times per week always at about 05:45 every morning. Walking activities are described in the section below. I maintained my running activities right until about the year 2012 when persistent ‘niggles’ in my right knee forced me to reluctantly abandon it.
Though the Camino is very obviously all about walking which makes being physically fit a very useful if not essential quality, it is more than just a Challenge walk, in which case you could participate in many other long distance trails that exist today in the World. There is a ‘something else’ about the Camino, a certain ‘mystery’, one that attracts participants from all over the World, in huge numbers. So you have to be very much aware of the consequences of this if you are to consider yourself not just physically prepared but also mentally and psychologically prepared for the journey that you undertake as a pilgrim anywhere along this route. An ability to get on with others is definitely a desirable quality if you want the Camino experience to be fulfilling and enjoyable.
In the sections that follow I outline the principal ‘qualities’, belief system and skills that I have acquired during my own journey through life. It was because I have acquired, absorbed all of these and nurtured what was already within me that when I set foot upon the Camino last September I just felt so amazingly ready, so amazingly confident, and so so so amazingly relaxed in every possible way – mentally and physically.
Destiny
Many times in my life I feel as though I have been guided, protected, moved by ‘something’. Hence the origin of the quotation on this site’s Homepage. Yes it all sounds a bit mysterious doesn’t it? There have been far too many events and ‘coincidences’ all of which convince me that they are not merely the results of random chance. Those that know me will hear me refer to this ‘something’ as ‘The Great Spirit’. A convenient term to use for somethinog that lies beyond the realms of my attempts at rational explanation.
There is also a saying that ‘what happens in our lives is already determined before we are born’. I believe things happen for a reason. We are not as in control of our futures as we would like to believe. I know this viewpoint is controversial as it implies that it’s a pointless exercise to plan ahead or to have any ambition to better yourself. So I will ask ‘Which of you saw the Coronavirus blighting the World in the way it has in 2020?’ I think many a well-laid plan for the future has been totally blown out of the water by it. You see our lives are all affected by powerful external forces well beyond our ability to control. In my case I feel that walking the Camino was something that I was meant to do…my passage through 66 years of life has provided me with everything I needed to do it.
Walking
For far too many this would be the most boring and pointless activity that they could ever think of engaging in. For myself it has been the exact opposite. A simple activity that befits a simple life. Simple and yet so rewarding….for both mind and body. It’s central to who I am, central to the very core of my being. It’s just as well because the very word Camino (The Way/The Path) has its origin in the verb ‘caminar’ (to walk). Other blog posts summarise the scope of my walking/hiking/mountaineering activities. They also illustrate how lucky I am to live in a country that contains such an amazing variety of landscapes within its boundaries….and an equally amazing variety of weather types. I have a cumulative history of 55 years of walking behind me. I owe it all an immense debt of gratitude. I learned to heed the lessons that Mother Nature teaches. You must work with her, learn from her (i.e. discover what your limitations are, your ‘achilles heel’), try to be at ‘one’ with her, but you must never ignore her nor fight her….as there will only ever be one winner.
The language
If Spanish language ability were to be measured on a scale from 0 to 10
where a score of 10 = as good as King Juan Carlos
and a score of 0 = I’m hoping that everyone in Spain speaks English
then I’d score my ability with Spanish as 6, which ought to be at least a 7 as I have lived with a Spanish-speaking wife for 29 years. I really should have adopted a policy at home of speaking Spanish only, for at least three months before departing for the Camino. Next time,eh? At least I’m honest! Another page on this site describes why I had to learn Spanish back in 1989. Of course even with a self-appointed ability level of 6 out of 10 in Spanish language, it should have been more than good enough to be a hugely useful asset to take along with me on this Camino. My future blog postings will describe how useful this asset was when put into practice. However even with a reasonably good command of any language a couple of issues have to be realised. All languages can be broadly split into two aspects:-
(1) the Conversational/Oral aspect …the day-to-day colloquial language participated in by all humans to communicate one with the other. In this domain reside the activity skills of speaking and listening.
(2) the Written/Reading aspect…. which covers the ability to interact with all forms of visual communication….to understand what is written down. In this domain reside the activity skills of reading and writing.
So far as the aspect of reading and writing in Spanish goes I have very few problems here. I can understand almost everything that I encounter in the day-to-day written domain:- Signposts, instructions, directions, descriptions, guide books, magazines, factual text books etc etc. Reading newspapers and let’s say works of fiction is more problematical as the authors of such are deliberately using ‘flowery’ language to make their respective literary creation somewhat different and special to what is the ‘norm’.
But it’s in the speaking and listening aspect where problems can occur initially even if you consider yourself to have a reasonably good grasp of the language of the country that you are in. Why? In my case the first issue is this:- My Spanish was learned in Colombia and this is also the version of the language to which I am exposed every day. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is said that the Colombian version of the language, as spoken by educated people, is the easiest to acquire by ‘foreigners’. Sonically it is considered quite ‘pure’ in linguistic terms. I am now able to distinguish the differences between it and the Spanish spoken in Argentina or Venezuela or Mexico. But all of these are identifiable as belonging to the broad umbrella of ‘Latin American’ Spanish which is quite sonically different to European (Peninsular) Spanish. Within seconds of listening to a Spanish speaker I know which side of the Atlantic they originate. It is exactly the same situation that exists between American and British English. So the problem that I anticipated in Spain was always going to be having to ‘tune in’ my ears to the local dialects of European Spanish at any one time. Remember that the Camino passes through some very culturally distinct regions of Spain, one manifestation of which are the distinct regional accents. In fact Basque is a unique and very very separate language in its own right that has defied all attempts by the most learned experts to explain its origin. Galician at the end of the Camino is more closely related to Portuguese than it is to ‘Castellano’. So yes, classical Spanish will always be understood any where along the Camino, so the locals would understand anything that I said, but it was receiving the reply that was going to be the problem area, particularly if they insisted on speaking at their normal conversational speed. It’d be exactly the same situation that an American would face if he/she were to travel from let’s say Lindisfarne Priory in the north of England to Holy Island in Scotland passing through Newcastle and Glasgow along the way. Sure the locals would understand what was said to them but I think the American would at first struggle to understand the reply unless the reply was uttered quite slowly, such is the difference between ‘Glaswegian English’ and the ‘BBC English’ that the rest of the World considers to be British English. The blog posts will faithfully and honestly report my experiences using my level 6 ‘Colombian’ Spanish whilst on the Camino.
To get by with ‘much less’.
I’ve always thought how nice it would be to get rid of all the useless cr*p that I have stashed away around the house. Marie Kondo fanatics are well aware of this sort of feeling. The Camino would be a good opportunity to check out the idea that life is possible with much much much less ‘stuff’ than we imagine.
We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.
Immanuel Kant
Gemini
One of my work colleagues from my earlier career set me off with this idea. In those days four of us shared a rather luxurious house in the south of England. At one of our regular communal meal times John, out of the blue, correctly guessed the birth signs of the rest of us!!! Three out of three. No he didn’t know our individual birthdays at the time. We’d only recently moved into that house together. John was a PhD consultant scientist who earned a lot of money and not one given to flights of fancy or sensationalism. But his mum dabbled in amateur astrology and did some part time horoscope predictions for those prepared to pay! So it all just set me thinking that there really was some substance in it. But maybe others are in a better position than I to judge whether I fit the sort of traits in the three graphics above. I recognise love of exploring and craving new things, love of communication, being cheerful and positive, and having what some would say ‘deep’ ideas about life in general.
Age
Well I’m not getting any younger as each birthday comes around. I have to be realistic and realise that there will be a time where I will no longer be able to undertake something like the Camino. But that time is not yet apparent. Fingers crossed. In this Camino I did walk with two peregrinos who were both 77 and both were walking very strongly. I’m hoping I can emulate them.
I walked it for those that couldn’t.
I find a source of tremendous motivation is to commemorate good people I have known in the past as I walk. For example members of my family who are no longer alive, good friends who are also no longer alive, but all of which would have loved to have been walking with me. So I literally ‘took’ them with me in my consciousness along the Camino and I liked to imagine they could see outwards through my eyes. There were ten of these fine people that I carried along with me in such manner. I’d dedicate a particular day to a particular person. And though I often walked alone I was never lonely.
I also walk for those that for various reasons can’t. It stops me feeling sorry for myself if I have any aches and pains. I see it like this – no ache nor pain that I feel could ever match the pain that I imagine a wheelchair bound person must feel knowing that they will never be able to walk a single inch. Because of it I never take for granted how lucky I am to be able to do what I do, to be able to choose where to walk, to choose when to go for a walk, to choose how far to walk.
To give Thanks
How long does it take to say ‘Thankyou’?….Two maybe three seconds?..unless you have a stammer. It’s not a huge amount of effort is it? Yet despite that there are several people to whom I owe a massive debt for what they contributed to my life and not once did I ever get around to thanking them for it. It just never occurred. I took things all so so much for granted. It just never occurred to me that one day they may not be here….until it was too late. A lesson I learned the hard way. Better late than never I suppose. Just a couple of Thank Yous would have meant so much to them. It would have taken less than ten seconds …. and it would also have saved me from the curse of the guilt that I feel deep down inside, a guilt that my conscience will have to bear for the rest of my life, however long that might be….As I walked the Camino in 2019 in my mind I uttered many silent Thank Yous in the hope that this would go some way to appease that sense of guilt . I hadn’t then anticipated that I’d be doing this retrospective blog. So my thoughts on all of this now have a more substantial resting place. I will return to this issue of the Thank Yous in some of the individual posts in which I will describe each of the days of the Camino.
The human element and the spiritual
My ideas on life, and values have changed so much during my journey through life. People mean much more to me now than ever before. In another blog I’ve described how I completely underestimated the impact on me of the human interaction dimension of that 20 day walk. Looking back at it now some of the stories and experiences that all of us shared when we got together have proven to be more memorable than the landscapes through which we walked. I also get more emotional now than I ever did. Maybe I think about things more deeply than I ever did. It’s as though my earlier life was dominated by the more strongly developed left hemisphere brain and so hence the attraction of science. But once I’d realised that science by itself will never be able to explain everything, the right hemisphere began to grow and influence the way I thought about things. There’s definitely a spiritual and intuitive element to this. Recently I was made aware of James Fowler’s ‘Stages of Faith’ which describes the development of spiritual awareness at various stages. He describes why most of us feel more spiritually aware as we enter the later stages of our lives. It’s as though we rediscover the holistic, organic view of life that we held instinctively as infants, before we learned to use words to describe concepts, as that’s what adults are expected to do. A word becomes a label and we begin to conceptualise life as a series of interactions between separate things, we seem to forget that there are some things that words can never describe!!! Much has been written about the Camino. Many walk it because they believe that there is an ‘energy’ given out by the Camino that can be described as spiritually uplifting.
For many peregrinos the friendships that they form with others are often the most memorable and lasting of the experiences that they take away with them. And this is also what I fully expected to experience during my Camino. I looked forward to it intensely.
Time to think
If nothing else a Camino of five to six weeks provides the perfect opportunity to think about ‘things’. There seems to be something about the simple activity of walking that clears the mind and often enables any of life’s problems or issues to be re-examined/re-evaluated with a fresh perspective that life back at home may not have made readily possible. Time to philosophise, time, for example, to wonder why it is that time seems to pass more quickly as we get older.
1 comment
Comment by cynthia villanueva
cynthia villanueva January 5, 2021 at 1:33 am
Camino Friend,
I just love your page one blog! It’s so wonderful to read about your life experiences before, after, and during your Camino!
Travel Bird 4488,
Cindy from Chicago