16: The interconnectedness of things

I still didn't have much of an idea of what it meant to be a pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago. It was only my fourth day, and I had met no other pilgrims and no real pilgrim services or shelters along the way. This was OK with me, because my plan was to learn these things as I went along. This turned out, I think, to be a good plan, even though it meant making some mistakes along the way.

I knew that the pilgrimage was becoming a trendy touristy thing. I had intentionally planned to avoid pilgrim shelters for this reason. I had wanted to rough it as much as possible, but now I was starting to have doubts about this. My previous experiences of roughing it had always been a few days only, and they had been different. They had usually been hitch hiking trips, which normally don't involve walking great distances on mountain trails.

Spending the whole day walking had not become a routine yet. It still felt like a sometimes arduous, sometimes exhilarating weekend retreat. My thoughts were fresh but scattered. I wondered what sorts of things I'd be learning over the next weeks. I looked at landmarks on the horizon and wondered how many hours I'd have to walk to reach them. I wondered if I'd be able to gauge distance well by the time I'd been doing this for several days.

I knew there would be plenty of time to meditate while walking, and I'd brought plenty of things to meditate on. I was meditating on the resurrection accounts in the gospels. I was meditating on the Lord's Prayer. I was meditating on the Efche (Jesus prayer). I was meditating on two or three hymns. I was meditating on some of the things that the monks at Taizé had said to me during Holy Week. I was meditating on the Epistle of James.

This was probably too much, and too disparate. And, not being very experienced in meditating, I found my thoughts wandering around a lot. Sometimes I let them wander, following them curiously to see where they were going. It wasn't until the last part of the pilgrimage that I would start to see how interconnected these various strands were. Maybe it means that God was guiding my thoughts to one point. Maybe it means that I don't have a large arsenal of original thoughts. Maybe I have only one, and, given enough time to trace my thoughts to their origins, I'll see that they all came from that one.

Most likely there were a handful of things on my mind, and my brain was following the trend of all human brains to associate everything with the things that are preoccupying it anyway.

You can connect any thought with another, if you give yourself enough time. To me, 40 days were enough to show me some surprises.