My Camino Journey Part 3, The Camino Begins to Teach Me

By the time I reached Roncesvalles, I had crossed the Pyrenees in the rain and answered one of my biggest questions about the Camino. I could handle a hard day on the journey. During that first week, I began to think about a different question. How would I stay open to what the Camino wanted to teach me?

Before I left for Spain, I sought professional guidance on how my pack should fit and on several other details of preparing for a long-distance hike. Then I put that advice to work. In Arizona, I trained in the clothes I planned to wear and carried the pack and trekking poles I would take with me. I wanted to know how that gear felt after hours of walking. If something needed to change, I wanted to find out while I was still in Arizona.

Some days I hiked with a group that included people who had already walked the Camino and others who were considering it. Every so often, someone would tell me my pack was sitting wrong or needed adjusting. Over time, I noticed that the comments came from the same one or two people.

I’m open to well-intended correction. That’s one reason I sought advice in the first place. But these comments landed differently. I knew how my pack felt because I’d spent hours walking with it. I was comfortable with how I had it adjusted, and hearing the same correction again gave me little reason to change it.

During my first week on the Camino, I met a couple of women whose comments brought those training hikes back to mind. This time, the conversation had nothing to do with my pack. I remember the talk being about things like how fast they were walking or how easy the hiking felt for them. I can’t recall the exact words, but I remember how I felt afterward. I wasn’t drawn to spending more time with them.

There was room for me to become a better hiker. I knew that in Arizona, and I knew it on the Camino. I could learn a great deal from someone who was curious about how I was doing or who offered something I could try for myself. These conversations helped me recognize how much I valued that kind of curiosity, both when someone gave me advice and when I was deciding whose company I wanted along the journey.

I’d gone to Arizona to find out whether I could trust my gear. Somewhere in all those miles, I’d also learned to trust my own assessment of how it was working for me. That was worth remembering in Spain, where someone else could be having an easy day and I could still take my own day, and my own pace, seriously.

Do you have people in your life whose words or actions leave you feeling small or unseen? How do you navigate those patterns?