Wrap-up (Sort of) Part II

My first experience in 2014 was short-lived due to physical issues. My second experience in 2015 was everything that I wanted and needed.

Both of my experiences are profoundly different: the first trip was spiritual and the second trip was physical.

I had to go back, both to continue my journey, and also because I felt the lessons from my first experience were slowly slipping away, and that I was - without much struggle - being pulled down into the quicksand of  'everyday life'.

Walking the El Camino is physically challenging; each day, despite the recovery each evening, the cumulative toll wears one out. After 15 days of hiking 13 miles a day and returning to Rochester, I was sleeping for 10 - 12 hours a day for days afterward. 

On the other hand, living the El Camino, altho' requiring a change in one's outlook and demeanor, relieves me of stressers that previously affected me negatively. 

I have not yet figured out what proportion of each part of the El Camino affects me so deeply. 

• The aloneness
• The physical effort
• The physical exhaustion
• The interactions with pilgrims
• The fluidity and relative uncertainty of each day
• The connectedness to the environment 
• The disconnectedness from the world
• The celebration of exceeding my abilities

After my first experience on the El Camino, I knew that I had changed profoundly ... and that change fed back into my life and how I lived. 

After my second experience, I had not changed so much as realized that my path in life had veered. 

Why the change? I'm not a believer that the El Camino changes one; more so, I believe that one wants to change and has chosen the El Camino as the instrument of the change. Since my first experience, and I think even more so now, the El Camino has become an integral part of who and what I am. I could no more stop thinking about my 'pilgrimage' anymore than I could deny an intimate part of my soul. The two are intertwined now ... more than that, my soul and the El Camino are interconnected, like neurons. To remove it from my history would be to introduce an amnesia over a fundamental part of my individuality.

After I got back to Rochester, I watched a show on the human brain that talked about how athletes enter the "slow mode", the "zone". I have not yet achieved that state in my hiking.  It's a state wherein the mind no longer operates on a conscious level, but instead surrenders total control of the body to the unconscious mind. This "slow state"/"zone" frees the person from having to think, monitor, direct the course of the body. It just happens. This will be my personal goal for 2016 on the El Camino. Then I will be free by feeling free of the concerns and issues on my "way".

I have not reached Santiago De Compostelo nor my own personal endpoint, the journey continues. I'm not sure what is/was/will be more difficult.

I have been joking that when I got on the plane in Spain to come back, that I decided that I would not return. The El Camino was just too physically demanding for me. The funny part is that when the plane was landing in Rochester, I had my Via De La Plata stage planner out and was looking for a time in 2016 to return to the El Camino.