I wonder who is watching me right now.

Someone must be watching me because I, too, am watching others. I am in the Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas airport. We are leaving Spain after spending the better part of a month here. And I am engaging in my second favorite pastime: people-watching.

People-watching is a lot like bird-watching, only more colorful. I am eating a sandwich with my wife, sipping coffee, and quietly observing all the species who go by.

As with birds, you can learn a lot about people just by watching.

I remember our fourth-grade Christmas pageant. I was a wise man. We had three wise men, but one of them was a girl because the girls in our class outnumbered the boys roughly 265 to 1. So Allen Powers and I were cast as “wise men,” but so was Brigette Parker, our trio’s only “wise woman” and the unofficial conscience of our battalion, who affectionately called Allen and me “wiseasses.”

But anyway,

before each performance, Mrs. Anderson used to always say to our class, “Always smile, because someone in the audience is watching you.”

As it happens, I am the one doing the watching today. I see a lot of travelers. I see a wide range of emotion. I see smiling. I see hugging. I see reunions. I see romance. I see maternal love. Also, I see people who seem to be tired, hyper-vigilant, anxious, in a hurry, confused, stressed out, and downright sad.

There is an older man and his wife, for example, holding each other and she looks like she is crying on his shoulder. I think they must be Spanish because their clothes and mannerisms say Spain. But her sorrow is a universal language of its own.

I can feel her agony from here.…

Our bus traveled from Finisterre to Santiago. We rode past the farmland and miniature pueblos of Galicia and landed in the motherland.

We had a three-hour layover in Santiago de Compostela where we had nothing to do but sit in an outdoor cafe, downtown, watching hordes of pilgrims arrive at the cathedral and publicly rejoice in Santiago Square.

And it was here that we battered and weary trail veterans silently processed the great human endeavor we ourselves had just completed.

This was my wife’s and my second Camino. And now it was over. Now our Camino would only exist in private memory. Flashes of mental images that once were, stored somewhere in the collective consciousness of mankind.

In a few hours we would be boarding a train with a lot of pilgrims who all smelled worse than chain-smoking billy goats, on our way back to the real world.

But each of us was moderately confused on this matter. “What IS the real world?” we were asking ourselves. “Is THIS the

real world, out here on the trail? Or is the real world found back home, paying cellphone bills, watching 24-hour news, and cutting the grass?”

But for some reason, here in Santiago, I felt alive. Maybe more alive than I’ve ever felt.

I’ve always been alive, of course. Ever since I was born. But sometimes you don’t FEEL alive. Sometimes you actually forget that you’re alive. Sometimes, you simply go through the motions of life.

Take me, for example. I think, perhaps, I’ve been merely going through the proverbial motions for most of my adulthood. Just existing.

How can a fool such as I forget how alive he is right now? After all, being alive is such a rare and precious gift. Do you know…