80: Pictures of dinner in the shelter in Güemes

79: the pilgrim shelter in Güemes

Long before I had started the pilgrimage, I had had vague imaginings of what I would encounter along the road. I often indulged in an image of a tavern out of an Asterix book or Lord of the Rings or whatever: Massive wooden tables, a roaring fire with an entire boar roasting on it, colorful anachronistic characters drinking and singing.

I really don't know why I kept coming back to that image. It probably had to do with the idea of being a Pilgrim, and all the medieval associations one has.

The shelter in Güemes was the first one that seemed to me what a pilgrim shelter should be. The sleeping room was nothing special, just a few bunk beds crammed into a room.

But then there was the eating area.

This included a small, rustic kitchen, an antiquated fireplace area where you could easily imagine an entire boar on a spit; a large solid table with chairs around it; and then an entire hanging out area. On the walls there were exotic posters from all over the world. There were shelves with random artifacts like fossils and mining lanterns. There were cushions around a small table with some interesting books on it. There was a puma hide on one wall. There was a great view of the valley outside from the large double door.

I was still looking for the "hospitalero". That's the person who runs the shelter. Outside in a sort of courtyard I found Matthieu, hanging out with some locals who were singing and laughing. Singing and laughing? Does that sound anachronistic or what?

I eventually got inscribed, took a shower and washed some of my clothes. In the meantime the hospitalero had gotten busy making us a dinner. Lone arrived, and two French women were already there. The six of us had dinner together. Afterwards we got a fire going in the large fireplace, and hung out talking for a while. We heard about the priest who ran this place. He was a traveling soul, and had actually taken most of the photographs and collected the artifacts that adorned the walls. He was, we were told, currently in Santo Toribio, where the year of jubilee was just coming to an end. Santo Toribio de Liebana is another one of the most frequently visited pilgrimage sites in the world, especially on the years of jubilee, like this year was. Apparently you can obtain special pardons.

This is one aspect of the Roman Catholic Church I've never understood.

78: What I Want To Do With My Life

One of the monks at Taize had encouraged me to ask myself what I wanted to do with my life. I wrote down the suggestion, and I doubt that I would otherwise have remembered it now because it had been so unpleasant to me that I had forgotten it soon afterwards. But I had now spent the walking day -- which, in spite of some pain, had been significantly better than the two days preceding it -- trying to keep returning to the question.

When Jona was chilling outside of Niniveh waiting for the city to go up in smoke, a vine grew near him and gave him shade. Then the vine died, and Jonah, lying in the hot sun and scorching wind, got to where he wished he were dead.

This sounds melodramatic. Over a vine. Over a hot day. But I go through far pettier melodrama every day. The smallest inconveniences trigger the response in me that I wish I had not been born. I notice that I've double-booked my Thursday afternoon and I have to call someone and cancel with them. I notice that my shifts begin at 5:30 AM the coming week. I have to ride my bike home and it's pouring rain and I didn't bring a jacket. That kind of thing. I sit there thinking, "why do I have to put up with being alive?"

I'm so glad that bit about Jonah is in the Bible. I'm so glad that Ecclesiastes is in the Bible, with its passages like

"And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
But better than both
is he who has not yet been,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun."

Without such passages, I would feel very lonely. Many people around me pretend that I'm the only one who has such thoughts, so it is comforting to see that some of the heroes of the Bible were already saying these things.

But if this is the way I feel, then what is the point of asking what I want from life? Whatever I want from life is only my secondary choice; it's like the guy who gets drafted into military service being asked what he wants to achieve while in the force. Maybe he has some goals; but maybe his greatest wish is to go home and have nothing to do with the war. How can he get passionate about any of his military goals if his inmost wish is that he hadn't been drafted in the first place?

It feels like anything I do in life can be compared to that point in a sleepless night when you realize that you won't fall asleep anyway and you resign yourself to being awake. At that point lying in bed becomes unbearable; it is pointless when you know that hope for sleep is in vain. Maybe you start reading, or doing some paperwork, or cleaning up, or watching television. But the fact is, you don't really have a strong desire to do any of these things; it is just that the thing you would like to be doing is not being granted to you as an option, so you fill your time with other things.

In this life I have resigned myself to not being allowed to rest, and I fill my time doing things that I may have some half-hearted interest in. Sometimes the interest is a lot more than half-hearted -- sometimes it could even be genuine desire, at any rate something that I bite myself into with a frightening tenacity -- but that is always embarassing. It is usually some minor issue, like getting a new lamp at my workplace; or it is something sinful, like envy or lust; or it is something utterly self-aggrandizing, like world fame.

What do I want to do with my life? Not live. But since I have no choice but to live it, what do I want to do? Well, there's Option A or Option B or Option C and so on (one of the curses of our blessed Western upbringing is that infinity of options). I could do any of them. I may have bit more interest in some than in others, but I don't really want any of them. On a practical level I'm just looking for a way to pass the remaining decades without increasing the pain and bitterness unnecessarily.

I bet that wasn't the answer the monk had been looking for when he asked me the question.