The road to enlightenment.
My friend has just set off on the Camino del Norte. She’s been suffering burnout at work and I wondered if the time-honoured road to enlightenment could help ease mental exhaustion from post-pandemic modern living?
While she’s not expecting to reach the holy grail of Santiago de Compostela, she has chosen a three week trek from Irun, northern Spain to Gijon, a coastal town near Oviedo in the Asturias, with a reputation as fierce under foot. And hopefully gentle on the mind.
A long-distance trek (pilgrimage for those spiritually minded) gives you plenty of time to stop the noise, allow your mind to wander and dream, knowing that the only thing you have to do the next day and the next day is pull your walking boots on and make it to a rest and dinner spot by dark. It could be testing or life-affirming – and when you set off, you’ve no idea what the outcome will be.
It’s strangely a routine like work: you get up early, pack and get out the door, walk for several hours, stop for lunch, stop for coffee, stop to remove your boots awhile, arriving at the end of your ‘work’ day a little bit tired, needing a shower and having to do some logistics and chores before bed. Put this on daily repeat. Then change working hours to walking hours and use this as brain time, to restore, renew and consider, occasionally chat. It’s peaceful and challenging at the same time, you can’t get away from yourself. The endless routine of it, gives an overstimulated brain the opportunity to unwind, unpick and weed out the unimportant aspects of life.
Camino Frances: the road more travelled
I followed the traditional route, the Camino Frances, in the Spring of 2011, with a group of four, all up for a long walk because it seemed an adventure and we were seasonal workers looking to kick back after the winter season in our various ski towns. You’ll find a lot of ski town workers choosing their holidays in the shoulder seasons of May and November when the weather in the mountains can be patchy and the work is scarce.
I can safely say I didn’t find spiritual enlightenment en route, but I did find some wonderful characters walking for very diverse reasons, a love of a tortilla baguettes, blisters where you never thought you could get blisters and the most solid friendships with my four, unshakeable no matter how many times a story was repeated with the same, inevitable punchline, on our month long trail.
My mind wasn’t in need of restoring. I already lived a fun-filled, if low-paid, lifestyle and I didn’t go with life-changing expectations, only fitness goals. Walk every day between 20km and 30km (at a rate of approximately 4km per hour) until we had swallowed up the 800km (500 miles) distance from St Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in the North West of Spain; feel fitter; maybe get slimmer. The tortilla baguettes put paid to that idea. Although many of our fellow pilgrims needed to add more notches on their belts as they went along.
For my friend, who has been grafting in London solidly for many years, I think this pause will provide a huge opportunity to reset. For those of us unable to afford luxury retreats we read about in the Sunday supplements, walking is a solid option for meditation, mindfulness and a sense of well-being. Once the initial days of chatter and ‘holiday-mode’ are passed, you are left with 5 or 6 walking hours each day to ponder the meaning of life, take in the beauty of nature and sit with your (in my case, poor) life choices.
Like any seated meditation, in the stillness of walking you will notice bits of your body that are starting to call out. It’s a surprise, because it’s only walking. But, each of my camino four had to make adjustments to alleviate pain: changing footwear, dealing with blisters, strapping ankles, raiding the pharmacy. Walking is what we’re built for, but our sedentary lives make us spectacularly unprepared to walk day in and day out for any length of time.
There are daily highs and lows, even with such a simple way of being. Lows invariably include not stopping for snacks at the last village and finding yourself all out of energy and sense of humour, overheating on open stretches of footpath when the sun is starting to scorch both you and the earth around you, finding that there is no accommodation in the village you intended to bed down in for the night and having to walk on to the next village when your legs were definitely ready to stop at this village. Highs are copious: taking your boots off, a coffee stop at the top of a hill, a powerful cleansing shower, the overwhelmingly beauty of the Spanish countryside, a cheery wave from a local.
Life at your own pace
As the days roll on, it becomes apparent you must walk at your own pace, not anyone else’s. It’s just not comfortable to try to keep stride with others. A great metaphor for my friend’s challenges in the big smoke. Small idiosyncrasies also become apparent: are you the kind of person who wakes a hostel full of walkers early in the morning by rustling all your plastic bags while packing or are you the last up, preferring to maximise the lie-in and run to catch-up? Do you like to walk for an hour before considering breakfast or are you frantically searching for the first coffee stop (I’m a frantic coffee searcher and definitely neither a bag rustler or the last up – I hate running). Personality traits emerge from the smallest of variances in doing the same activity. Observing your own way of being in these moments can be illuminating.
My own voyage of discovery led to the conclusion that I like variety; four weeks of walking ended up being too much of a good thing, I vowed only a week at a time maximum in future. I am very adept at clearing my mind and enjoying the view without thinking of too much else, but when the view remained constant for the day my brain started to explode (if you’ve walked across the unendingly flat Meseta, you’ll know what I mean) – I’m easily bored and need new, shiny things to look at. Not always ideal in our doom-scrolling world. Most of all, I actually need so little to be happy – a daily purpose, two changes of clothes, access to nature and a hot shower and I’ll be smiling (my partner would say “and constant access to snacks”).
I’m following the progress of my friend as she journeys to unwind. Let’s see if the act of taking it step by step can help her find a more enjoyable path for the future.
