So, what is my motivation for going on this journey? Like Jack Hitt, author of Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route Into Spain, I think my motivation for walking the Camino likely is just to discover what my motivation is. I have always been one of those all-or-nothing kinds of people. Rob pegged it when he said that there is no in-between with me; I have either got to be reading on the bed with all of my muscles atrophying or flying across the globe to walk five hundred miles. I do not even know if it is possible, after all of these years of being the way that I am, for me to learn how to just mosey and to enjoy some-or-something. Every day cannot be Christmas; I honestly do know that. And every discovery does not have to be grandly epiphanizing; I get that too. Even Anne-with-an-e of Green Gables eventually realized that not all of her rides upon thrilling winds of anticipation were worth the thuds of disappointment she experienced when she fell. But, truthfully, I have never been very good at just conducting life, of toiling on a narrow road, of helping others through the minutia of another day.
I must have spent too much time reading books like Zorba the Greek, because, at some point, I started to see myself in mythological terms. (I actually once compared myself to Persephone “who spent part of her year in an inky underworld and the other in a glorious, bursting spring.”) I have treated every single thing I have ever done as a means toward the end of a hero’s journey— as Browning’s “last of life for which the first was made.” In so doing, I have missed the joys of “getting there” or, more particularly, of getting others, namely my children, there. I have experienced life’s details as annoying and tedious, treating them merely as pathways to greater goals. I have flown by the seat of my anticipation, floating a distance from life rather than walking hand-in-hand with those who are life. This Camino trip is about coming down to earth and contentedly spending the rest of my years living with and loving people here.
So, what do I expect to find on the road to Santiago? Transitory notions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Yes, hopefully some. Answers to abstruse and recondite mysteries? Nope, none whatsoever. I do not need to encounter a brand new ecstatic truth or to dream up another exciting scheme for my future. While I am walking through never-ending wheat fields, over stony creek beds, and in Galician loam on my hardscrabble path, I hope to learn appreciation for small pleasures and normal essentials: cool water, a handful of apricots, cheese, bread, and a pillow on which to rest my head. I hope to learn how to rejoin community and how to wrangle life’s details. I hope to hear a person say a funny line, to have a chance encounter, and maybe to produce a few thoughts that will give me the power to see others as they truly are and myself as I really am. But, most of all, I just want to find dirt and stickers in my SmartWool PhD socks as proof that, for a change, I have walked with my head out of the clouds and my nine toes firmly planted to the ground.
I must have spent too much time reading books like Zorba the Greek, because, at some point, I started to see myself in mythological terms. (I actually once compared myself to Persephone “who spent part of her year in an inky underworld and the other in a glorious, bursting spring.”) I have treated every single thing I have ever done as a means toward the end of a hero’s journey— as Browning’s “last of life for which the first was made.” In so doing, I have missed the joys of “getting there” or, more particularly, of getting others, namely my children, there. I have experienced life’s details as annoying and tedious, treating them merely as pathways to greater goals. I have flown by the seat of my anticipation, floating a distance from life rather than walking hand-in-hand with those who are life. This Camino trip is about coming down to earth and contentedly spending the rest of my years living with and loving people here.
So, what do I expect to find on the road to Santiago? Transitory notions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Yes, hopefully some. Answers to abstruse and recondite mysteries? Nope, none whatsoever. I do not need to encounter a brand new ecstatic truth or to dream up another exciting scheme for my future. While I am walking through never-ending wheat fields, over stony creek beds, and in Galician loam on my hardscrabble path, I hope to learn appreciation for small pleasures and normal essentials: cool water, a handful of apricots, cheese, bread, and a pillow on which to rest my head. I hope to learn how to rejoin community and how to wrangle life’s details. I hope to hear a person say a funny line, to have a chance encounter, and maybe to produce a few thoughts that will give me the power to see others as they truly are and myself as I really am. But, most of all, I just want to find dirt and stickers in my SmartWool PhD socks as proof that, for a change, I have walked with my head out of the clouds and my nine toes firmly planted to the ground.
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