DEAR SEAN: 

I don’t get why you’re doing the Camino. Can you explain why you feel it’s necessary to torture yourself for spiritual reasons? It all sounds like Catholic self-flagellation, very medieval to me. Pointless. 

DEAR FRIEND: 

You make a good point. 

When you’re out here on the Camino de Santiago, God knows, you’re tired of walking. Tired of moving your feet. You’re not tired physically. Your body feels okay, mostly, except for the fact that everything—even the gray matter of your brain—feels like it has been drop kicked by a 19-year-old NFL draftee. 

You’re tired mentally. You don’t WANT to walk. You are no longer excited by the idea of walking. Walking does nothing to thrill you, spiritually. 

At one time, walking was a beautiful act. A way of connecting you with your fellow human being. With nature. With life. But now walking is an offensive concept. Walking is a dirty word. 

Walking is this thing you do because you HAVE to. Because you signed up for this. It is almost like you are in the military now. Except you’re not a marine; you are not serving your country. You’re paying good money to do this crap. 

You are in the wilds of far-flung rural Spain, walking by your own choosing. So there is no one to blame for your situation but yourself. 

Your mornings start EARLY. You have no choice because your albergue du jour has a checkout time of 7:30 a.m. and you must evacuate the premises immediately so that an overworked, middle-aged, moderately depressed, Spanish man carrying a backpack vacuum canister can fumigate the entire bunk room for bedbugs, lice, and flatulent fumes, all of which you still carry on your person, within the very fibers of your clothing, so that you may re-experience these fragrant fumes and nanoscopic insects throughout the trail. 

Even so, you don’t want to leave the bunk room. You don’t want to get out of bed and take a cold shower in a shower stall with a drain that is clogged, regurgitating its generations of dead skin cells and tiny, curly pubis hairs. 

You want to sit on your fat American assumptions and watch endless reality television. You want to eat Rice Krispy treats, hot from the oven, glistening with butter, sticky with that sweet, blessed marshmallow goop. You want to wear your Willie Nelson ‘91 T-shirt and old flannel pajama bottoms, peppered with holes in anatomically important regions. 

But here you are. Walking. 

The sound of your feet is like a percussion instrument. The rhythm of your steps follows the same tempo as a Souza march. There are hanging items jangling from your backpack so that it sounds faintly like you’re a sheep, wandering through a pasture, wearing a livestock bell. 

In a way, you are not that different from a livestock animal. Out here you are like a mule. Or a camel. Or a jackass. 

The thumping sound of your rubber soles against the trail starts to work its way into your consciousness, and soon you don’t even notice this thump-scrape sound. It’s just always there. 

Thump, thump, scrape, thump…

At which point your mind wanders into far off places. Your childhood memories, once hazy and unidentifiable, become inexplicably clear. Emotions you once buried, long ago, rise to the surface. 

You walk for 8 or 10 hours per day. Most of this is silence. This silence gives you no choice but to relive your greatest triumphs and your most colossal failures. Your biggest wins. Your worst traumas. Your life flashes before your eyes every day out here. The good. The bad. The embarrassing.

At the end of the day, you play the fiddle on your bunk, and other pilgrims sort of leave the scrawny, pale, chicken-legged American fiddler alone as you reflect. 

And that’s when you realize that it’s been years since you last dropped in on yourself. It’s been decades since you last asked how You were doing. 

Somehow the walk of ordinary life has made you numb. And somewhere along the way you quit checking in on You. 

You quit taking care of You. You have been too busy caring for everyone else. Too busy doing unto others to even have the energy to do unto Yourself. You forgot to pay attention to your heart. Your spirit. You became like one of those confused protagonists in a Hallmark Movie Channel presentation, except, unlike these actors, you don’t look good naked. 

But. 

Now you’re here, paying attention. You’re outside yourself. Inside yourself. With yourself. Alongside yourself. Walking. With the real You. 

Not the “you” whom you project to the outside world. Not the “you” everyone expects you to be. Not even the “you” you think you are. This is the original version of You. The You whom you lost touch with. The You whom God spent so much time creating. 

“Self-flagellation”? No. Self-communication. Yes. Self-conversation. Self-rehabilitation. Self-actualization. 

And anyway, that’s why You do the Camino