A human experience - part 3

One of the direct causes of Zeno Howiacki's decision to walk the Camino de Santiago was a book by Paulo Coelho. Maybe the most famous book about that pilgrimage. Definitely a reason why so many people from South Korea come to the south of France and the north of Spain. At least if you believe what a girl from there told me when we were entering Nájera. For the Brazilian writer it was this walk of almost 800 km that changed everything about his life. In his biography it is presented as one of the turning points on his way to becoming a writer. In a different scale, but the same happened to a Spanish pensioner I overheard when she was saying that before the pilgrimage she hardly knew herself. It is impossible not to mention here the volunteers that come and work helping pilgrims and the owners of those special albergue along the way who devote their lifes to caring from those who walk to Santiago. Two of them, a Brazilian and a woman from Italy, they moved to Spain and decided to start their own albergue. Now they live maybe 10 metres from the road through which passes the pilgrimage. She has walked the entire 800 km four times. As she remarked, each of those pilgrimage has been completely different from the previous ones. Life changing.

It might seem that a pilgrimage is full of contrasts and contradictions. If it is life changing for those mentioned just a paragraph before, and simultaneously, a holiday for others, a statement this is certainly strongly substantiated by many examoples. Regardless of how one evaluates it, there is a group of people making a pilgrimage as their holiday. A hospitalero (Spanish for a person working in an albergue) from Ayegui has described this phenomenon as “Ibization” of the Camino de Santiago (from Ibiza) and he clearly understood it in a negative way. Yet, numerous people I have talked with were more than happy to be walking this pilgrimage and to be on their vacation. When you discussed it with them, you could see a genuine smile of pure exhilaration on their faces. Can anyone simply negate this? To give you an example, a woman working in New Zealand in a job that she loved but also in a job that was intense, fast-paced and all-consuming took 6 week off to recharge her batteries. She decided to make a pilgrimage and she walked to Santiago de Compostela having experienced many unique moments along the way. Of course, there will be people who would seem disinterested, or maybe even disrespectful, but in judging them you would become more irreverent. You do not know why they are really there and a person can be hiding their motivation really well. Especially if it is very personal to them.

A pilgrimage can indeed be very personal if it is understood as a was of getting to know yourself. Marcel Proust wrote years ago something that applies here. He said that, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”. The pensioner mentioned above certainly saw herself with new eyes. So did Elisabeth Gilbert after she travelled to Italy, India and Indonesia as described in her book. This has also been the fate of a German who read Indian philosophers that I run into in Santiago de Compostela. They could have changed everything but they did not need to. A pilgrimage might have changed it already, or at least a part of it. And that was enough.

Before I conclude these deliberations, if a pilgrimage is all of the above for different people, is there anything that is common to all pilgrims? I will most likely never know who was it, but someone did write a sentence on the bunk bed I was sleeping in few days before arriving in Santiago. It said, Camino es la vida, what means The Way is life. The first impression might be that outside of the normal life, that is, when on a pilgrimage, that you can feel that you are alive. However, when you consider it for a moment, it may actually be the other way round. On a pilgrimage you are alone and with other people. You see beauty and you are challenged. You go far and yet you stay in one place. You get to know yourself and you take a holiday. You change your life. A pilgrimage, it seems, is a human experience that we all live and share. Even if we do not notice it or try to forget it.