{"id":431,"date":"2016-03-05T03:42:21","date_gmt":"2016-03-05T11:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.evergreen.edu\/camino-liubri01\/?p=99"},"modified":"2016-03-05T03:42:21","modified_gmt":"2016-03-05T11:42:21","slug":"one-year-after-the-camino-frances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/caminomap\/one-year-after-the-camino-frances\/","title":{"rendered":"One Year After the Camino Frances"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Every pilgrim’s temptation is the need to encounter a brand new truth, preferably one that’s panoramic, cinematic, and ecstatic. \u00a0Like the tidy endings of airport novels or the neat package of lessons learned that close so many movies, they are more literary devices signifying the expectations of the genre then the truth of what happened.” – Jack Hitt,\u00a0Off The Road<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s amazing how quickly the dirt and sweat rinses off at the end of the day. \u00a0It’s amazing how fast a year goes by. \u00a0All of a sudden I’m not sitting in a kitchen, in Estella, waiting for a bowl of soup to be ladled to me by a kind Argentinian woman named, Claudia. \u00a0Now, I’m here, sitting in front of a computer, wondering what I can say that won’t trivialize this whole shebang. \u00a0It’s not hard to admit: I miss the Camino. \u00a0I work hard not to romanticize the two and a half months I spent walking through northern Spain. \u00a0Life was somehow easier then, simplified to: waking up, tossing everything I owned into a backpack, and going for a walk. \u00a0Perhaps pilgrims\u00a0are\u00a0<\/em>somehow the lucky ones, forgetting the woes of modern life for a second, capable of leaving behind the monthly bills, their jobs, their loved ones (Tony Kevin, a former Australian ambassador, left behind his wife and children for two months), to go on a long walk. \u00a0Then after however long we come back. \u00a0And it’s Life all over again. \u00a0Mundane, boring, gray, and slow. David Foster Wallace on the importance of learning how to think when you’re in\u00a0the 9 to 5 grind: “Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year. But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.”<\/p>\n

Jack Hitt, too, emphasizes the importance of being able to sift through the deadly meaninglessness of life for those small kernels that take you out of your head, “The private pleasures of having children require some work if you are going to get past the kiddie pics and the grandma stories. \u00a0Like the road to Santiago: Stay mucked up in the details and keep your eyes peeled for the occasional gem. \u00a0Saint James is not much of a saint if you’re shopping for ecstatic epiphany.”<\/p>\n

Italo Calvino offers the same insight, ”
\n\u201cThe inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Problem is, as David Foster Wallace put it, “It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.”<\/p>\n

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