El Camino de Londres
A pilgrim’s guide to life in a busy world
‘If I ever have a friend who’s in need of help, I tell them to see a therapist I know in Santiago. But I tell them they need to walk 800km to get there, and when they arrive they’ll no longer need the therapist.’ José — Fellow pilgrim July 2017
I’ve just come back to London from walking the Camino del Norte; an 815km pilgrimage across northern Spain taking around 35 days.
It’s a very simple life: you carry everything with you on your back, your decisions are limited to how far to walk each day and what to eat, and you don’t even have to follow a map: your route is guided by yellow arrows throughout (oh, if only we had yellow arrows guiding us around real life!)
With all the stillness your mind can go slightly doolally. I generally had four modes of operation as I walked:
- Immense gratitude and appreciation for how beautiful the scenery was and how lucky I was to be walking (including how much I wanted to run through the fields of wheat/corn like Theresa May)
- BRAIN IN OVERLOAD — Questioning everything — mad flurry of panic, regret, guilt, indecision about my past, present and future.
- Obsession with something immediate — needing the loo, needing a coffee, needing to get to an albergue because it was so hot, wondering why the final 2km felt like 200km.
- Singing musicals, Disney and other classics.
With nothing to do each day but walk with my thoughts, over time I developed a series of mantras and practises that helped me lighten the load, and which I aim to bring back to London too…
1. Do you need to worry about this right now?
I must admit I was quite overwhelmed with the explosion of internal chatter that appeared in my mind during the camino!
Did I put my out of office on?
I should get in touch with that person about a project in February
I really regret a conversation I had at school when I was 12
Do I still want to play the ukulele?
I’m not sure I should have brought a 500 page tome on the camino
STOP.
Seriously. You’re in the middle of a forest with eucalyptus trees.
Firstly — enjoy the view.
Secondly — what do you want to do about it? Stop walking? Sit on the mountain side, turn on your data and start writing to people? That just wasn’t an option.
So I had to get used to saying ‘not now, not now’.
Often,giving these worries space, they either worked themselves out or didn’t seem as important when I came back to them. Or the fact that I’d been walking all day meant I was in a much calmer state of mind to respond to people when I did stop.
I was conscious of how often when sitting at my desk I would have acted on all those things immediately and triggered even more issues because of my hastiness.
2. What’s the single next step you need to take?
When I started in Irún on 10th July, I was 815km from my destination. Now on day one I did not expect to arrive in Santiago, and did not announce myself a failure for only doing 24km. All I knew was I had to reach the end of etapa 1 — San Sebastian, and then next day the etapa 2 in the next town and so on. And after 35 days of asking, ‘where to today?’, I made it to Santiago.
It seems obvious, but I struggle to practise this at home. After one DJ lesson — why can I not beat match perfectly? After entering one comedy competition — oh I didn’t get through so that’s the end of my comedy career.
I want to consider the equivalent of ‘etapas’ with other things in my life: especially in work. Having the end goal in sight, but focusing right now on the single next step of the project that needs my attention.
3. Can you do anything about it?
Sometimes my worries seemed like a more immediate concern — like getting a place at a small first-come first-served albergue.
My mind was going mad: if I don’t get a space, I’ll have to fork out for a hotel or get a bus to the next town. I really hope I get a bed. What if there aren’t enough beds?!
What could I actually do about it in that moment?
I could walk faster and rush my day, but that still didn’t guarantee me a bed — I had no idea how many walkers were in front of me.
Really, all I could do was keep walking and then when I arrived at the albergue deal with the outcome then.
And you know what? In 5 weeks, I ALWAYS got a bed in an albergue. Many times I got the very last bed, but it always worked out.
4. If it’s happened, let it go.
I should have gone on the primitivo camino with everyone else (well, you didn’t)
I should have read the T&Cs on booking.com website and not paid 65 euros to cancel a reservation (it’s done)
I shouldn’t have left my sleeping bag at the albergue (what you going to do, go back 50km?)
It’s happened.
It’s gone.
MOVE ON.
Walking is great for this — physically shaking arms and legs, blowing out sharp bursts of air, letting it all go…
5. What if no-one else was involved right now?
I found it very difficult at first to tune into what I needed to do for myself. I spent the first two weeks with a group of pilgrims and then took a rest day, meaning the group were then always one day ahead of me. I found myself trying to rush my walking so I could catch up with them, but it felt stressful.
Then I asked myself what I would do if no-one else I knew was on the camino, and I had the answer to let them go and do my own thing. The stress and feeling of pressure also instantly left me.
Being on the camino on your own is of course a huge luxury, and the reality of everyday life is that you are often in situations which do involve thinking of others’ needs. But if you’re continually finding yourself in a situation you wouldn’t choose for yourself, then something needs to change…
6. There will always be someone doing MORE than you
I hadn’t expected there to be such a sense of competition on the camino: I noticed that there was an undercurrent of ‘walking further is better’. For the last section I felt happy that I would be doing a day of 33km and a day of 27km. But then I met people that were doing the whole walk in one day — 60km. I then met someone who said: ‘that’s nothing, a friend we met did 120km in one day’. It made me realise, that there will ALWAYS be someone doing more, someone who is pushing it further. So don’t try and compete that, just focus on doing what’s right for your body and that makes you feel excited!
7. What do my feet say?
Sometimes I was so in my head trying to make a decision of where to stop, that I forgot that my feet were the ones doing the work! I would ask my feet how they were doing and it was almost like they were a child I had in tow: sometimes they complained: ‘nooo, please can we stop!’ and sometimes they squealed: ‘let’s run up another hill’.
8. Human MOT
I often put my ability to walk down to external things: the heat or rain, the fact I was alone or with others, my heavy backpack, the state of my blisters.
But whereas on one day I’d blame the rain for my struggle, on another day the rain was really fun and I’d be singing musicals at the top of my voice as my poncho blew up in the storm! So what was it?
I realised our ability to walk (and indeed function in life) is pretty much down to three things:
- How much you’ve slept/rested
- How much you’ve eaten
- How much water you’ve drunk
I saw so clearly how much my body needed to be fed with energy and looked after so that it could function properly. How often do we sit at our desks exhausted, hungry and dehydrated and blame the fact that the task is boring or that a colleague is annoying us? The internal helps us deal with the external.
9. Rest day means double energy the next day
I really really struggled taking a rest day. Although I knew beforehand that I would inevitably take some, when it came round to it, it was bound up with feelings of inadequacy. But without exception, when I took a day to chill, the next day I flew through my kilometres!
Back home I want to remember that if I’m ever feeling exhausted to give in and trust that the next day I’ll be back in the groove, rather than spending even more energy feeling bad about being tired and resisting what my body needs.
10. If it feels too forced, let it go — something better might just be waiting…
Ever had the experience where you try to pay for flights online and your card keeps getting rejected, but then the next day something comes up which means you’re no longer available on those dates? I had a lot of these moments on the camino, where I felt I was trying TOO HARD to get something to work out: accommodation, meeting someone, carrying on walking — and actually when I gave into what naturally wanted to happen that was when I met the best people and stayed in the best places. Thank GOD I didn’t pursue that, I was thinking! So trust the way things are going, and don’t get too fixed on a particular outcome.
Final thoughts…
With all that stillness, the camino really is one big mirror for who you are and how you experience life. It shows you how you deal with being alone and in groups, what you’re like at your best and your worst, how you set goals, how much you challenge yourself, how you view failure, how you pick yourself up again, and how you practise self care. It’s all there for you to see and you can’t hide away from it. I found myself slowly accepting parts of myself that I have fought for years, realising that subconsciously we are creating our world exactly the way it needs to be, even if we tell ourselves we’d prefer it to be otherwise.
I really recommend even a week of walking to anyone who wants to simplify life for a bit, clear their head and get into nature.
And I wonder if really we do have yellow arrows in real life — they are our internal guidance system, which nudges us: ‘this way…’, if we can be still enough to see them…
