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…

The ancients called this place the end of the world. And that’s what they believed it was.

It is the westernmost part of Spain, jutting into the Atlantic, reaching into a seeming eternity. There is nothing after this shoreline. No more land to conquer. No more to see. The Romans called it Finis terrae. The Spanish call it Finisterre. The local Galicians call it Fisterra.

Long before the Cathedral of St. James became the official finish line of the Camino, it was here. This place. This was the end of the ancient walk. Pilgrims of old would hike this long route to Fisterra and stand on the shore looking at the end of the earth.

I suppose they would sit on this shore and ponder the great questions of life. They would try to figure it all out, using that delicate and feeble organ between their ears.

After which, they would remove a single scallop shell from the sandy beach and carry it with them on the

return journey home.

After we arrived in Santiago, we caught a bus to Fisterra. We rented a small cottage perched on a rocky shore and sat on the rocks, dangling our feet above the water. Our walk was finally over, and our bodies were sore. That night we ate a simple dinner of bread and tomatoes and olive oil and beer and slumbered like newborns.

I awoke early the next morning to watch the sunrise. The fishing boats were out, casting their nets, pulling in the spoils. Small boats, with young men, laboring in the dark purple hues of morning.

And I replayed the Camino we had just finished walking. I relived every lunch we ate in open pastures, and each albergue we bunked in. But on a deeper level, I think I was…

It is among the grandest churches in the world. It is one of the greatest achievements of man that took so long to build that architectural periods changed several times throughout its construction.

Even so, when you walk into Santiago de Compostela the first thing you see is not the cathedral. You neither see the gilded grandeur, nor the ornate.

The first things you see are pilgrims.

You see many, many pilgrims. You hear the tick-tick-ticking of their thousands of hiking poles, striking the flagstone streets with each stride.

They come from all over the globe, the pilgrims. And if you’ve spent any time walking the Camino at all, you have already learned to tell which pilgrim is from which country before ever hearing them speak. It’s all in the way they carry themselves.

The Germans are confident and contained, with tight, economical movements, and magnificently stoic. The French are loose-strided, open-eyed, and smiley; they carry box-wine in their backpacks, and their noses are sometimes slightly tilted upward.

The

Italians really do speak with their limbs, and when they tell you a story, they are not ashamed to cry or laugh, sometimes doing both at the same time.

The Dutch are courteous and quiet, often wearing at least one article of orange clothing. The Australians carry their own Vegemite for their toast. The New Zealanders have ninja-like senses of humor.

The South Americans, particularly the Venezuelans, hug everyone, for any occasion, including the onset of Daylight Saving Time.

The South Koreans are calm, polite. They clean up their table for their servers, and walk the Camino faster than U.S. Marines. The Chinese are kind to a fault, and in cafés they insist that others cut in line ahead of them, and place their orders before them.

We made it.

Things I’ve seen in Spain.

Little children, deviceless in public, making blatant eye contact with adults, behaving ten years more mature than their age.

Employees taking breaks in the middle of each day to be with their family, their friends, and to drink a glass of beer, and laugh loudly in sidewalk cafés with loved ones.

Old men taking long walks alone. Hands clasped behind their backs in silent contemplation. Moving their bodies, since they do not own a car. Even in their late 90s, they walk. They walk to the market for groceries. They walk to the bar to see their friends and eat supper. They dress in nice clothes. No tennis shoes in sight. No lounge shorts or T-shirts with phrases printed on the fronts saying “Yer Trailer or Mine?” They wear khakis. Button downs. Sweaters. Flat caps.

Public toilets without folding seats, only surgically cold porcelain bowls, so you have to hover, thereby subjecting every muscle in your body to an incredible test of endurance.

Bathroom light switches located

outside the bathroom wall instead of inside where it would make sense. So, when you enter the bathroom and it’s dark, you are soon searching for a switch by feeling around on the interior walls but can feel no protrusions so you end up saying “Hell with it,” and perform your necessaries in the ink darkness.

Succulent plants as big as small trees.

Teenagers, sitting quietly in cafés, playing newspaper crossword puzzles with a pencil in hand. No phones.

Young men hand-rolling their cigarettes non-ironically.

Giving gifts just because.

Being able to buy a beer—a good beer, not the American porta-john-flavored beer—for less than a buck.

Hanging laundry, flapping in the breeze, white in the sunlight, fragrant with the…

Lugo, Spain, is a mini metropolis compared to the remoteness of the Camino Primitivo. For days we have been hiking in isolated mountains and faraway countrysides. It’s startling to see a city suddenly emerge from the landscape.

We are looking at tall apartment buildings which stand over Lugo, and listening to the noise of traffic. The city is a vibrant oasis, teeming with life, an abundance of history, and iPhone retailers.

The cobblestones lead us into town, winding us past ragged stone walls, dating back to ancient Roman days. This is the only city in the world with such pristinely preserved Roman walls still surrounding the city. When you look at these walls, when you touch them, you get the distinct feeling that your species, your entire race, your culture, everything you know, is only slightly older than Keith Richards.

In other words, we humans are young. Painfully young. It was not that long ago, for example, that we as a race were solving our most

pressing socio-economic issues with big sticks. Consequently, not much has changed among our species, except that our big sticks are now powered by AI software.

The walls of Lugo would’ve been built in 263 A.D. to defend this town against invasion. And they look almost the same as they did back in Roman times, except now there are more underwear ads.

Each June, the town of Lugo puts on a huge festival called Arde Lucus, wherein people dress up in Roman and Celtic costumes. The festival features gladiator-fight reenactments, ancient music, lots of dancing, lots of beer, and the ancient human tradition of waiting in line for porta-johns. Some 500,000 people attend the festival, just to remind themselves of Spain’s Roman heritage.

But today, all we pilgrims know of Lugo is that this city means…

I have learned that everyone walks the Camino for a reason. This is my second Camino, and thus far I have not met anyone who approaches this 1,500-year-old path without a spiritual and emotional objective.

The reasons are not always clear. Sometimes the reasons are even unclear to the person walking. But the reasons are there. They walk so they can find something. Something unnameable.

They don’t know what this something is. They just know that this something is not the same “something” their parents, their family, their culture, or their religion has tried to cram down their gullet.

The young Austrian student, Heinrich. “I walk the Camino because when I leave University, I know that I do not want to do what my father and brothers have been doing in life. Which is work, work, work. And for what? Why do they work? More money? More things? What about God? Where does he fit in? Is he just another thing? Or is he all things?”

The 22-year-young woman from Ukraine. “All my brothers are in the military, and the man I was going to marry died in the war, and my father is dead. It seems my family’s whole life has been about wars and fighting and dying. I need peace. I have come here to seek peace.”

David, a middle-aged man from Colorado. “I sold all my possessions and started volunteering at this albergue because I want to be of service to pilgrims and anyone who travels this road. I know what this road can do. In the US, we are sometimes so focused on the wrong things, like becoming famous or growth and prosperity. Our American culture is very businesslike, always focused on more, more, more. But God is found in less, less, less.”

The 22-year-young woman from…

What is God?

This single question underpins all things on the Camino de Santiago, a trail inhabited by us full-time pilgrims whose lives are contained in backpacks.

We pilgrims think about this question as we walk. We ponder this question even as we are sleeping. Many pilgrims report having vivid dreams while on the Camino.

Sometimes we aren’t even sure what we’re asking when we ask this question. But we all ask it at some point nonetheless.

This morning we awoke in the hamlet of Fonsagrada. Weary pilgrims, from all four corners of the world, cooked breakfasts in a communal kitchen, and I interviewed them. “What is God?” I asked. The answers were all over the map.

What is God?

Is God a king? Is that honestly all he is? Is he a throne-sitter? A deity overlord, authoritarian and master, holding a giant scepter, wearing an ornate crown, like a magistrate holding political office? Why does God seem to need the ostentation of thrones and crowns and titles? Those

are the spoils of man, things man has warred over since ancient times.

Or is God even a he? Is it profane to even ask this? And why? Does he need a singular sex, and if so, why do we care so much about it?

Isn’t God both paternal and maternal? Doesn’t God cradle her children against her bosom the way a mother holds an infant? Hasn’t God held you against herself in your hour of deepest sorrow, when all you could do was cry into the folds of her skirt? Doesn’t God defend the weak the way a mother protects her young?

Or is God human-like at all? Does God have four limbs? A nose? How about kidneys? Toes? Teeth? Does God have…