One Year Later: What I Carried and What I Left Behind

Where pilgrims come to lay down what they can’t carry any farther.

A year ago, I finished 5 days of walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

If you read an earlier blog from me, The Miles That Changed Me, you know about the 28 mile walk I took 2 years ago. This walk happened on a date that was meant to be celebrated but would be celebrated in a different way that particular year. I promised a follow up blog: the story of the pilgrimage that gave me direction. It has taken me a year to sit down and write it, which feels fitting. Some stories need distance before you can tell them clearly.

Five Days on the Camino

Last year, I spent 5 days walking a stretch of the Camino de Santiago in Spain with friends. If you are not familiar, the Camino is an ancient pilgrimage route, people have walked it for over a thousand years, for reasons as varied as people themselves.

And that is what struck me most, everyone on that path was walking for a different reason. I remember one man in particular. He was walking on the anniversary of losing his wife, doing the thing they had always loved to do together, hike. He, much like others, start out with heaviness and sometimes sadness yet somehow, walking with it seems to lighten the load.

I understood that more than I expected to.

Where I Was Standing

At the time, my life had been in turmoil and limbo for several years. I was standing at a crossroads in my personal life, moving towards a life I did not ask for, unsure of where I would end up. My professional life was also going through its own transitions. Almost every path I thought I was on had quietly turned me down a new road, and I had no idea which direction to go next. Being in my 50’s and facing that much uncertainty made me feel vulnerable in ways I wasn’t used to.

You hear people say, “starting over in my 50’s was the best thing that ever happened to me,” and it sounds so inspirational and romantic. I can’t say that is true for me, not yet, maybe not ever, in that tidy way. But I have learned something, I have learned to stay open to the idea that other paths, even one’s I did not choose, can still lead somewhere good.

Walking Toward Clarity

I have written before about how walking outside clears my head, how it brings me closer to God, gives me hope, and gives my brain the time it needs to work through what it is carrying. Somewhere in the rhythm of footsteps, a clear path starts to reveal itself. The Camino was that, amplified. Five days of walking, thinking, praying, and listening to the stories of strangers who became something like companions.

The Stone

Along the Camino, there are milestone markers where pilgrims leave behind small things such as stones, often with something written on them. It is a quiet tradition, a way of releasing grief, or pain, or honoring someone’s memory…one stone at a time along a thousand year old path.

Early in my walk I found a stone. I carried it with me for the rest of those five days through conversations, through silence, through ache in my legs and questions in my head. Near the end of the walk on that last day, I laid it down. And I walked away without it. I took a photo to always remind myself what I walked away from and that I did not need to pick it back up.

It is strange how something so small, a rock, an image of letting go could become such a powerful marker in my mind. A dividing line between what was behind me and what was ahead of me.

An Echo of the Walk Before

It reminded me of that 28 mile walk two years earlier, the one I wrote about in The Miles that Changed Me”. On that walk, I was surrounded by friends and family for most of the miles, but I finished it on my own. This pilgrimage held the same shape. I walked alongside friends for five days, full of conversation and shared meals and other people’s stories. But laying down the stone, and turning to walk on without its weight, was mine to do alone.

Two walks, two years apart, and both times the company carried me most the way, but the release was something I had to do by myself.

One Year Later

I still do not know exactly where this road leads. But I know I am walking it without all the previous weight and pain. And some days, that is enough.