2: Preparations

On the entire Camino de Santiago, I was the least prepared pilgrim I encountered. I may have been the only one who took a trenchcoat along, but I was also the only one with no maps or guide books. I was also the only one I met who started out on the pilgrim journey with a guitar on his back.

My formal research for the "Camino de Santiago" was done in about five minutes. I typed the words into a search engine. I found out that there were several pilgrim routes to Santiago. I decided on the northern one, because it 1. went by the sea, and 2. was less busy than the Camino Frances. I made vague plans to start my pilgrimage shortly after Easter somewhere around that point where the French/Spanish border meets the Atlantic coast.

On March 19, 2007, I hitch hiked out of Amsterdam to Grenoble. I spent 10 days working at Champfleuri, a sort of campground near Grenoble. I also made my first attempts at downhill skiing. This might have been a mistake, considering I would still need those legs for a long walk. There is a video here that shows a typical scene of my attempts to ski.

The view from Champfleuri

For Easter Week I went to Taize. This was probably the wisest thing I could have done as a prelude to a pilgrimage. Taize is an ecumenical monastery near Cluny (France). The prayers, the songs, the long periods of silence, the walks through the beautiful surrounding area, the conversations with monks and workshops led by them, and the interactions with other people who came to participate... all these things laid a good groundwork for a pilgrimage.

The Taize sanctuary

On Easter Sunday, after the celebration and lunch, I got a ride in one of the buses taking a group of Portuguese young people to Lisbon. Around 2 AM on Easter Monday they dropped me off in St. Jean-de-Luz. I was now a pilgrim.

Soon after arriving in St. Jean-de-Luz I found myself on this street, named (in French and Basque) after the pilgrim route to Santiago.

1: Why we do things. For example, why I go on a pilgrimage.

Do any of us know why we do things? At face value, it seems so obvious: we have needs and desires, and we meet them. We eat because we're hungry, we sleep because we're tired, we go to college because we want an education.

And yet, if I honestly look at why I do things, I find that it is not so simple. Why then do I eat when I am not hungry? Why do I not sleep even when I'm tired? Did I really seek higher education, or did I decide to go to university quite independently of that factor? Maybe the "real" reasons are too petty and whimsical (or too shameful) for me to admit to anyone -- even myself -- so I fabricate more legitimate "reasons" that I start believing as well.

In one of George Bernard Shaw's plays (I can't remember which one), one of the characters says something like, "We rarely know why we do things. If we did, would we still do them?"

Some people say that the rationality in our decisions is an illusion: all our decisions are made from our "gut", and we come up with reasons to justify them afterwards. Sometimes "afterwards" is a matter of split seconds, so that we cannot tell that the decision was there before our reasons were. Even the decisions we tackle with all our rationality -- perhaps writing long lists of pros and cons -- cannot truly be taken with our rationality alone. Something needs to evaluate why a given circumstance is a pro or a con, and this something is virtually always some form of self-interest. Even our most altruistic acts give us something in return, or else we simply wouldn't do them.

I do not know why I decided to take a 40-day pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. I don't even remember when I first heard about it. It would have been 2003 or maybe 2004. It might have been while I was on a hitch hiking trip, or in conversation with friends. I really don't know. But I do know that the moment I heard about it, my response was, "I'm doing that someday."

Is it possible to decide something and then discover, through reflection and meditation, what the real reason for my decision was? I asked myself this question again and again during the pilgrimage. Over time I had found three good reasons to take this trip:

1. I like walking.

2. I like getting to know new countries, but I don't like being lost in a country where I do not speak the language.

3. I'd like to take some time to pray and reflect.

At over 800 Kilometers, the Camino de Santiago is a long walk -- it took me 40 days -- through an area in which the infrastructure exists to make walking a good experience. I'd never been in Spain before, but I do speak Spanish. 40 days in which I do nothing but walk would be a good time to reflect, meditate, and learn about prayer.

But if these were my real reasons, why would it have taken me so long to figure them out? If these were not my real reasons, what were the real reasons, and would they also sound so much like the sort of things that would lure a person like me to such an experience?

I noticed that every pilgrim I met along the way was slightly uneasy about being asked why he or she was making this trip. Some of the answers I heard:
"Because it's there."
"I just decided I'd follow yellow arrows and see where they would lead me."
"I want to be able to believe in myself, and crossing the entire country on foot will definitely help."
"Well, I've done the Camino Frances, the Camino de la Plata and the Camino Portugues. Now I decided it was time for the Camino Norte."
"Well, I'm certainly not doing it for religious reasons."

At first it struck me that none of these are satisfactory answers to the question, but then I began wondering what exactly I would expect a satisfactory answer to look like.

On my 38th day, when the pilgrimage was almost finished, I might have heard the best explanation. Ivar from Norway, who had just finished his theological studies and was about to be ordained as a Lutheran pastor, put it more or less like this:

"All the pilgrims are here for spiritual reasons. Many don't know it, and some will go to great lengths to make it clear that those are not their reasons. But our problem is that we have some sort of expectation of what we imagine a spiritual reason to be, and our expectation is not matched by whatever it was that drove us to come walk here. But see for yourself how we all grope for the words to explain why we are making this road. We've forgotten the spirituality of simply walking. What else could be behind all this if not a spiritual reason?"

1: (Introduction)

How does one summarize a pilgrimage? In a way, it feels a bit like cheating to even try to do so.

I can (and will) talk about what it did for me personally, although you must be warned that the deepest things it did for me will probably go unmentioned. I can talk about what I remember about the landscape, or the food, or the company, or the weather, but here I warn you again that I do not remember it to any satisfying degree of detail or interest. I can talk about where my mind went during the long walks, which songs I sang and which Bible verses I meditated on.

But all this does not really summarize the pilgrimage. My temptation is to tell people, "go do your own." The real meaning of a pilgrimage can't be put in words, but the experience itself is freely available to practically everyone who really wants to try it.

I heard that Beethoven was once asked what one of his pieces "meant", and as a reply he sat down and played it again.

Walking for 40 days proved a very therapeutic experience. We all know that even a day's nature walk can be a good brain massage, but somewhere between Day 5 and Day 20 the "nature walk" became my routine mode of existence. It was no longer a distraction from everyday life; it was everyday life. This meant, of course, that the novelty wore off. But it also meant that the scattered thoughts which briefly inspire you during a nature walk were given a chance to burrow much deeper into the fog of my mind. "Revealing" is a good word for what they did.

I was told that when you start working out, it takes several weeks before the muscles themselves actually start growing. Until then, the exercise mostly helps your body to adjust and fine-tune itself. While this does also increase your strength, it is not until after this phase that actual muscle growth begins.

Maybe the best way to introduce a series of pilgrim meditations is by answering the frequently asked questions. Most people ask me what I learned, and to answer with "a lot" seems unfair, so here's a few specific lessons:

-One fault in my character can influence the most diverse and unrelated areas of my life. Maybe this is just another way of saying that the most unrelated areas of my life are in fact related.

-Prayer is the dialogue that takes place in the deepest parts of the soul. This means, for one thing, that no one can really say of themselves that they aren't into prayer, although most of us are out of touch with our prayers. It also means (and this surprised me) that our prayer is frequently the opposite of what we think it is.

-Sometimes we think we need less of something when we really need more. For example, you'd think that to be truly impartial you need to have as little team loyalty as possible, but it turns out that you can't be impartial unless you have a very high team loyalty -- only it can't be to either of the parties you're adjudicating between.

-Sometimes the same disease has opposite symptoms, and opposite diseases have the same symptoms. Low blood sugar sometimes manifests itself in the same way as high blood sugar, and compulsive overeating may have the same disorder at its root as compulsive self-starvation. OK, this is a no-brainer, but when you first find out that in your own life you've been going the wrong way because of a misdiagnosis of this nature, you feel that you've learned this for the first time.

-I learned again that most of my questions don't need answering; they need to be lived with in peace. I also learned that there is very little I can do to achieve that, but that's OK because if I could do these things, what the heck would I need Jesus for?

Maybe I could have learned these things without a pilgrimage, but why do it the hard way?

I walked. That's the long and short of it. I walked through rain and fog and blazing sunlight, and sometimes at night. I walked on grass, mud, asphalt, ancient Roman cobblestone roads; through cities, eucalyptus forests, cow pastures, beaches, mountain passes, abandoned towns, and plenty of tiny villages; I walked when I was feeling happy and light, I walked when I was in screaming pain. I walked with others, I walked alone.

You get the idea.

Since I didn't have reliable means to cook my food, I ate mostly what could go directly from my hand to my mouth, without first having to be cooked or whatever. This made for a bit of monotony and a bit of frustration.

I did less research than any pilgrim I met along the way, and as a result got to do more improvising. Also got lost more often.

I thought I was doing some serious damage to my body. My back seemed to be straining in unnatural ways under the lopsided weight of my improvised backpack, and my walking posture became so unhealthy-looking that many people commented on it. But in the end, my masseuse said that the long walk did wonders for my back and for my nerves.

This is an extremely clumsy summary of my pilgrim voyage. I think it would be summarized much better in the four words I already used: "Go do your own."