I’ll Do It My Way
I have often denied my competitive streak. My husband observed differently. In playing board games with the kids when they were younger, I of course found natural ways to let them win. As they grew older, I thought it was good for them to have a healthy competition so would play to win, as the game was meant to be played. However, I was a good loser and really didn’t care. Get me with adults though it was a different ball game, especially if the group was competitive. I would hide my disappointment if I lost and not be obnoxious when I won but inside, he was right, I wanted to win and I hated losing. Once I accepted that I was indeed competitive, I justified it by knowing actors needed to have a competitive edge to understand what the character needed to fight to win in a scene.
As sports became more and more a thing of the distant past, physically I could no longer compete and in the last few years I didn’t even think of playing sports, even though in just a few years back, I enjoyed playing tennis if someone was at my speed. I was still coordinated but lumbered on the courts. In the last year it would have been impossible for I couldn’t even run anymore. My knee was shot from an enthusiastic attempt at starting a running program. It has never recovered.
The first day of the Camino I was very aware of people passing me. I knew I had a short stride and was in terrible shape so I had to tell myself throughout the day to not try and compete. It’s not a race. It was a surprise to me how many people thought differently. In the beginning especially, the talk in the albergues was all about how many hours you walked, what distance you covered, how far you were going to go the next day. I was always the last person into the albergue in the afternoon having walked the same or less distance in twice the time. I tended not to participate in the conversation. I was like the last kid in the class to be picked to play baseball. I think people were surprised I was even walking at all.
I seem to have this fierce pride that was making me determined to walk at least as far as the people who I was chumming with. I would commit to meeting them at an assigned albergue sometimes 20 or 25 km. away. When I was sometimes 6 or 8 kilometres from my destination, I would curse myself for having promised I would be there. My feet were killing me and I was always finding these last km. very difficult especially knowing I still had two hours to go. In the beginning of the walk it was very hilly and every town was on a hilltop so the last part of the walk was always grueling. Here I had committed to listening to my body and trying to respect what was going on and I was in fact totally ignoring it.
By the time I reached Burgos, one-third of the way, I was dying to be alone. Despite the fact that I would walk alone each day, I was beginning to really feel peopled in the albergues. At first, I hated to complain about them, feeling it wasn’t in the spirit of the pilgrimage and was usually pretty good-natured but the truth was I was growing to dislike the experience immensely. The list of ills included sleeping in a room with up to forty people in a room; mixed showers and bathrooms so that you had to change in the tiny shower that rarely had hot water; bunk beds sometimes three high with the size of a sideways body in between the bunks; sleeping in a mummy sleeping bag, not fun for an overweight person who has hot flashes; listening all night to a chorus of snoring, coughing, farting, sneezing and those who talking their sleep; 10 PM curfew - lights out, no talking; the morning exodus of rustling plastic bags starting at 6 AM; dressing in front of strangers of both sexes; and to top it off there was an epidemic of bedbugs that was deforming people all around me with huge itchy welts on their bodies that lasted weeks. Somehow I had managed to miraculously escape this last painful indignity.
The only redeeming factor was the people you met. There were sometimes
surly hostelarios but generally everyone was kind and generous. At times there would be such a wonderful sense of community and support. We cooked meals together, tended each other’s wounds, listened to each other’s stories. I formed instant friendships and really grew to care and admire some pilgrims. Sometimes you wouldn’t see each other for weeks and there would be such a sense of joy and comraderie as you met up again, catching up on each other’s tales of woe, pain, exhilarating and funny experiences.
In Burgos I finally admitted I wanted to spend time in a hotel. I booked in and to my disappointment there was a half-sized bath, which I attempted to use just because I wanted a bath so badly. To say the least it was an amusing adventure sitting in this silly tub, which ended up with more of me out of the bath than in, scrunched up like a sandwich. Despite that disappointment, I spent the night alone without the chorus of bodily sounds keeping me awake and got up the next morning refreshed and packed up my bag for the hundredth time.
Then as soon as I swung the pack around to put on my back, I quickly threw it off onto the bed and said, “Fuck this”. I didn’t want to go. I know I had people to keep up with and that if I delayed a day I would fall behind, but I didn’t care. I realized I had been caught up in what I called Pilgrim Frenzy. The first out the door, the fastest and longest distance you could go, then all evening talk about your aches and pains and what you had achieved. I was guilty of it but had been pushing myself way beyond my capabilities. My feet were a mess. By the end of the day, I was walking as if I had hot needles in every part of my foot, they hurt so much. It would take hours for me to ease the pain. My body desperately needed to rest and rethink this whole thing. I didn’t know what I would do differently for there seemed to be a pilgrim culture that I had bought into. All I knew was that I wasn’t enjoying myself and my body hurt like hell.
The Camino, it is said has three stages to it. The first stage has been compared to facing up to Death, the second stage is Dying and the third stage is Rebirth. It is also said to have natural physical boundaries, St Jean Pied de Port to Burgos, between Burgos and Leon and then Leon to Santiago.
I had reached Burgos and knew that the next phase of Dying would be to give something up of myself. It was this drive that seems to always be with me - to go, go, go. I had been in this mode for the last twenty years and here I was attempting a spiritual journey at high speed. I had decided this was a love affair with my body and I was abusing it in the worst possible way, everyday pushing it beyond its limit. My poor feet were sending urgent telegrams directly to my brain and I wouldn’t receive them, covering up the messages with painkillers.
So I stayed and rested. I bought salt and vinegar and put the mini bath to good use soaking my feet throughout the day. I wandered around this beautiful medieval town of El Cid and had the best meal I had in weeks. I caught up on emails and wrote a long newsletter to friends and family.
The next day I was much happier than I’d been in weeks and was out to discover a different Camino than the one I had been on so far. If this stage was about dying and letting go of past ways of being, I was not having an easy death. I watched myself struggle to really slow down. Constantly reminding myself to listen to my body. Pride played a big part and I had to let go of it. I would enjoy being with certain people and then caught up with keeping up. I would find myself walking faster just to “get there” and have to stop myself, breathe and slow down. I was still obsessed with the end goal, the next albergue, where I could take off my boots and get my feet up and would constantly bring my mind back to being exactly where I was and stop living in the future. I realized that “there” was “here” but found that hard to really live by.
As I was approaching Lyon, I had an urgent sense of needing to be there a day earlier than the walk would have allowed. I had read the walk into Lyon was very difficult due to walking beside highways, factories and through the suburbs. I opted as many pilgrims do, to go into Lyon by bus at the end of a long day of walking. It was 18 km. away, a walk of about 5 or 6 hours the next day. I felt Pilgrim guilt as if I was cheating but again was being urged on by this strange desire to get there that night.
It was a national holiday, celebrating the Virgen de Pilar (check), and the hotel I was going to treat myself to was full as were many others. A helpful hotel phoned around and I ended up in a very comfortable place. Lyon, like Burgos, is a gorgeous city with a river running down the middle and wide-open car-free avenues. The old section is filled with narrow little avenues that twist and turn and surprise. That night I went out for dinner and on the streets I was overwhelmed by the number of people, families, couples, groups of young people, thousands of them. Everywhere I had to wend my way through the crowd. Restaurants were packed full of laughing, celebrating faces. After the isolation and familiarity of the Camino, this was quite nerve-wracking.
I found myself more and more isolated, not wanting to sit alone in the restaurants amongst the joyful comraderie. I started to find my body closing in on itself. My loneliness was becoming unbearable but when I did see a familiar pilgrim in the crowds I avoided him for I needed to be alone. I pictured myself in these ancient, narrow, crowded streets as some sort of isolated Dostoevsky character, which I did find rather amusing.
I ended up in a pizza restaurant after two hours of wandering, right next to my hotel. While I was eating, I reflected on this loneliness in the crowd and the unease I felt. Why couldn’t I just enjoy the crowd and people watch. What was happening to me tonight? More to the point, what was I doing here?
With each bite of the pizza, the puzzle pieces started to click into place. What was I doing here? I had said to my Camino coach, Sue that one of the reasons I wanted to walk the Camino was to find inner peace. I wanted to truly find what it was to be alone and be happy. I had come a long way with this through the Incredible Summer but it was evenings like this that I realized there was still so much left to understand about myself with this matter.
I knew that this journey had been as far from the spiritual journey than I could imagine. I was always dealing with my painful feet, my struggling desire to stop walking, the boredom with myself, and the nights spent at the crowded albergues. I realized that despite my resolve in Burgos to “do it my way”, I was still caught up in doing what was somehow expected of me. I had come to the Camino with a purpose that I had forgotten about. In my unhappiness of being there I was always moaning rhetorically “What the hell am I doing here?”, but didn’t spend any time trying to answer it.
There was a reason I was here besides just doing it to say I’d done it. I was good at muscling my way through difficult situations. I knew I could do that already, what I didn’t know was how to do something difficult and be at peace with it. That was what I needed to work on and I had the time to do this. I didn’t need to grit my teeth through the Camino, I needed to really stop and see it for all it’s beauty and see what was there for me for in my heart. I knew that I was here for a reason rather than to repeat old patterns.
A most satisfying decision I made was to stop staying at the refugios. I was very unhappy there and getting more freaked out about the bedbugs as they were so bad now that TV stations were interviewing pilgrims about them. My justification was more idealistic than spoiling myself to hotels or casa rurales (private homes that opened their rooms to pilgrims). I wanted to write in the evening of my experience and my thoughts. This book was forming in my mind and I wanted to keep a record of ideas that came to me when walking. I also wanted to meditate and do some yoga as my poor old body was taking quite a beating. I was looking forward to being able to stretch naked in fresh sheets and not get tangled up in my sleeping bag and most of all I wanted to be alone in the evenings.
By the end of the pizza I was in a completely different place. I now had a stake, something to come back to each time I felt lost of purpose. I could ask myself, how can I be at peace with this moment.
The next day I ran into the pilgrims I had spent the last few days with. I had a moment with lovely Lisa and the first thing she said is “You look different. You look so peaceful.” Now that was quick progress.
I have often denied my competitive streak. My husband observed differently. In playing board games with the kids when they were younger, I of course found natural ways to let them win. As they grew older, I thought it was good for them to have a healthy competition so would play to win, as the game was meant to be played. However, I was a good loser and really didn’t care. Get me with adults though it was a different ball game, especially if the group was competitive. I would hide my disappointment if I lost and not be obnoxious when I won but inside, he was right, I wanted to win and I hated losing. Once I accepted that I was indeed competitive, I justified it by knowing actors needed to have a competitive edge to understand what the character needed to fight to win in a scene.
As sports became more and more a thing of the distant past, physically I could no longer compete and in the last few years I didn’t even think of playing sports, even though in just a few years back, I enjoyed playing tennis if someone was at my speed. I was still coordinated but lumbered on the courts. In the last year it would have been impossible for I couldn’t even run anymore. My knee was shot from an enthusiastic attempt at starting a running program. It has never recovered.
The first day of the Camino I was very aware of people passing me. I knew I had a short stride and was in terrible shape so I had to tell myself throughout the day to not try and compete. It’s not a race. It was a surprise to me how many people thought differently. In the beginning especially, the talk in the albergues was all about how many hours you walked, what distance you covered, how far you were going to go the next day. I was always the last person into the albergue in the afternoon having walked the same or less distance in twice the time. I tended not to participate in the conversation. I was like the last kid in the class to be picked to play baseball. I think people were surprised I was even walking at all.
I seem to have this fierce pride that was making me determined to walk at least as far as the people who I was chumming with. I would commit to meeting them at an assigned albergue sometimes 20 or 25 km. away. When I was sometimes 6 or 8 kilometres from my destination, I would curse myself for having promised I would be there. My feet were killing me and I was always finding these last km. very difficult especially knowing I still had two hours to go. In the beginning of the walk it was very hilly and every town was on a hilltop so the last part of the walk was always grueling. Here I had committed to listening to my body and trying to respect what was going on and I was in fact totally ignoring it.
By the time I reached Burgos, one-third of the way, I was dying to be alone. Despite the fact that I would walk alone each day, I was beginning to really feel peopled in the albergues. At first, I hated to complain about them, feeling it wasn’t in the spirit of the pilgrimage and was usually pretty good-natured but the truth was I was growing to dislike the experience immensely. The list of ills included sleeping in a room with up to forty people in a room; mixed showers and bathrooms so that you had to change in the tiny shower that rarely had hot water; bunk beds sometimes three high with the size of a sideways body in between the bunks; sleeping in a mummy sleeping bag, not fun for an overweight person who has hot flashes; listening all night to a chorus of snoring, coughing, farting, sneezing and those who talking their sleep; 10 PM curfew - lights out, no talking; the morning exodus of rustling plastic bags starting at 6 AM; dressing in front of strangers of both sexes; and to top it off there was an epidemic of bedbugs that was deforming people all around me with huge itchy welts on their bodies that lasted weeks. Somehow I had managed to miraculously escape this last painful indignity.
The only redeeming factor was the people you met. There were sometimes
surly hostelarios but generally everyone was kind and generous. At times there would be such a wonderful sense of community and support. We cooked meals together, tended each other’s wounds, listened to each other’s stories. I formed instant friendships and really grew to care and admire some pilgrims. Sometimes you wouldn’t see each other for weeks and there would be such a sense of joy and comraderie as you met up again, catching up on each other’s tales of woe, pain, exhilarating and funny experiences.
In Burgos I finally admitted I wanted to spend time in a hotel. I booked in and to my disappointment there was a half-sized bath, which I attempted to use just because I wanted a bath so badly. To say the least it was an amusing adventure sitting in this silly tub, which ended up with more of me out of the bath than in, scrunched up like a sandwich. Despite that disappointment, I spent the night alone without the chorus of bodily sounds keeping me awake and got up the next morning refreshed and packed up my bag for the hundredth time.
Then as soon as I swung the pack around to put on my back, I quickly threw it off onto the bed and said, “Fuck this”. I didn’t want to go. I know I had people to keep up with and that if I delayed a day I would fall behind, but I didn’t care. I realized I had been caught up in what I called Pilgrim Frenzy. The first out the door, the fastest and longest distance you could go, then all evening talk about your aches and pains and what you had achieved. I was guilty of it but had been pushing myself way beyond my capabilities. My feet were a mess. By the end of the day, I was walking as if I had hot needles in every part of my foot, they hurt so much. It would take hours for me to ease the pain. My body desperately needed to rest and rethink this whole thing. I didn’t know what I would do differently for there seemed to be a pilgrim culture that I had bought into. All I knew was that I wasn’t enjoying myself and my body hurt like hell.
The Camino, it is said has three stages to it. The first stage has been compared to facing up to Death, the second stage is Dying and the third stage is Rebirth. It is also said to have natural physical boundaries, St Jean Pied de Port to Burgos, between Burgos and Leon and then Leon to Santiago.
I had reached Burgos and knew that the next phase of Dying would be to give something up of myself. It was this drive that seems to always be with me - to go, go, go. I had been in this mode for the last twenty years and here I was attempting a spiritual journey at high speed. I had decided this was a love affair with my body and I was abusing it in the worst possible way, everyday pushing it beyond its limit. My poor feet were sending urgent telegrams directly to my brain and I wouldn’t receive them, covering up the messages with painkillers.
So I stayed and rested. I bought salt and vinegar and put the mini bath to good use soaking my feet throughout the day. I wandered around this beautiful medieval town of El Cid and had the best meal I had in weeks. I caught up on emails and wrote a long newsletter to friends and family.
The next day I was much happier than I’d been in weeks and was out to discover a different Camino than the one I had been on so far. If this stage was about dying and letting go of past ways of being, I was not having an easy death. I watched myself struggle to really slow down. Constantly reminding myself to listen to my body. Pride played a big part and I had to let go of it. I would enjoy being with certain people and then caught up with keeping up. I would find myself walking faster just to “get there” and have to stop myself, breathe and slow down. I was still obsessed with the end goal, the next albergue, where I could take off my boots and get my feet up and would constantly bring my mind back to being exactly where I was and stop living in the future. I realized that “there” was “here” but found that hard to really live by.
As I was approaching Lyon, I had an urgent sense of needing to be there a day earlier than the walk would have allowed. I had read the walk into Lyon was very difficult due to walking beside highways, factories and through the suburbs. I opted as many pilgrims do, to go into Lyon by bus at the end of a long day of walking. It was 18 km. away, a walk of about 5 or 6 hours the next day. I felt Pilgrim guilt as if I was cheating but again was being urged on by this strange desire to get there that night.
It was a national holiday, celebrating the Virgen de Pilar (check), and the hotel I was going to treat myself to was full as were many others. A helpful hotel phoned around and I ended up in a very comfortable place. Lyon, like Burgos, is a gorgeous city with a river running down the middle and wide-open car-free avenues. The old section is filled with narrow little avenues that twist and turn and surprise. That night I went out for dinner and on the streets I was overwhelmed by the number of people, families, couples, groups of young people, thousands of them. Everywhere I had to wend my way through the crowd. Restaurants were packed full of laughing, celebrating faces. After the isolation and familiarity of the Camino, this was quite nerve-wracking.
I found myself more and more isolated, not wanting to sit alone in the restaurants amongst the joyful comraderie. I started to find my body closing in on itself. My loneliness was becoming unbearable but when I did see a familiar pilgrim in the crowds I avoided him for I needed to be alone. I pictured myself in these ancient, narrow, crowded streets as some sort of isolated Dostoevsky character, which I did find rather amusing.
I ended up in a pizza restaurant after two hours of wandering, right next to my hotel. While I was eating, I reflected on this loneliness in the crowd and the unease I felt. Why couldn’t I just enjoy the crowd and people watch. What was happening to me tonight? More to the point, what was I doing here?
With each bite of the pizza, the puzzle pieces started to click into place. What was I doing here? I had said to my Camino coach, Sue that one of the reasons I wanted to walk the Camino was to find inner peace. I wanted to truly find what it was to be alone and be happy. I had come a long way with this through the Incredible Summer but it was evenings like this that I realized there was still so much left to understand about myself with this matter.
I knew that this journey had been as far from the spiritual journey than I could imagine. I was always dealing with my painful feet, my struggling desire to stop walking, the boredom with myself, and the nights spent at the crowded albergues. I realized that despite my resolve in Burgos to “do it my way”, I was still caught up in doing what was somehow expected of me. I had come to the Camino with a purpose that I had forgotten about. In my unhappiness of being there I was always moaning rhetorically “What the hell am I doing here?”, but didn’t spend any time trying to answer it.
There was a reason I was here besides just doing it to say I’d done it. I was good at muscling my way through difficult situations. I knew I could do that already, what I didn’t know was how to do something difficult and be at peace with it. That was what I needed to work on and I had the time to do this. I didn’t need to grit my teeth through the Camino, I needed to really stop and see it for all it’s beauty and see what was there for me for in my heart. I knew that I was here for a reason rather than to repeat old patterns.
A most satisfying decision I made was to stop staying at the refugios. I was very unhappy there and getting more freaked out about the bedbugs as they were so bad now that TV stations were interviewing pilgrims about them. My justification was more idealistic than spoiling myself to hotels or casa rurales (private homes that opened their rooms to pilgrims). I wanted to write in the evening of my experience and my thoughts. This book was forming in my mind and I wanted to keep a record of ideas that came to me when walking. I also wanted to meditate and do some yoga as my poor old body was taking quite a beating. I was looking forward to being able to stretch naked in fresh sheets and not get tangled up in my sleeping bag and most of all I wanted to be alone in the evenings.
By the end of the pizza I was in a completely different place. I now had a stake, something to come back to each time I felt lost of purpose. I could ask myself, how can I be at peace with this moment.
The next day I ran into the pilgrims I had spent the last few days with. I had a moment with lovely Lisa and the first thing she said is “You look different. You look so peaceful.” Now that was quick progress.