Walking the Camino del Norte

Walking the Camino del Norte

Time to unpack some memories and write about those times when I was roaming the roads of the great Camino without any answer to the following questions: Where am I heading? When I will get there? What will happen tomorrow? I had no answers, I just walked and walked and lived. On the endless road you become a ship without a rudder. Almost two years after, I'm still thinking a lot about it. It's still the greatest adventure of my life yet and I haven't done anything else to match it.

Walking the Camino

Camino de Santiago Road Sign

On the road you are alone with your thoughts, sometimes you share your loneliness with a fellow traveler for a short while but it's your thoughts that are your loyal companion. Your world now is a foreign land with a foreign language and all your possessions are the ones you carry on your back. Your world is both drastically reduced and drastically expanded at the same time. It's hard, it's uncertain, you start considering yourself crazy for doing this but it's the best time of your life. I've wondered ever since if it's not best for all of us to live our lives endlessly walking, to know only the reality of the road, no more sedentary life, no more sitting on a chair, to start being humans again, to start using that upright walk that differentiates us from other creatures, to stop living in the webs of the Internet, to stop wasting our lives watching what others do, to stop asking for validation from social media "friends" and their "likes". On the road you will find real kindness and likes. People will help you with more than what one 'like' will ever be. What you will learn, experience and become on the road can never happen on social media. Social media is information clout, artifice, propaganda and deceitfulness. The road is very real, it doesn't care who you are, where do you come from and where you are heading. You are free to walk on the road but the price you are paying for doing it is high. You are paying it with your feet, your health, your time, your energy, your faith but what you pay is never as high as what you gain and what you gain is never lost. On the road you will find the true meaning of Carpe Diem. On the road you will find what getting to know yourself means.