Look up
“Time’s going by too fast and it hasn’t happened yet,” I say to Rachael, my friend and guide on the Camino de Santiago, as we take our first steps up into the Pyrenees after four days of walking through France. The landscapes we’d crossed (and were about to) were surreal. So much so that I had laughingly accused Rachael of drugging us … that in fact we were all laying on mats in the hotel where we’d met up, loaded up with psychedelics.
Even so, the thunderclap I’d been anticipating—the one I was convinced must await me on this epic two-week trip along a millenia-old path that is literally lined up with the stars—hadn’t occurred. I’d been walking. Sweating. Chatting with friends. Spending hours alone. Aching. Sleeping hard. Navigating obstacles and personalities. And… not a single deep insight. Not one life-changing perspective. Not yet. And at this point we were nearly halfway done. I was starting to panic.
I can’t remember Rach’s precise words (she is a ninja in all ways, including when it comes to spiritual guidance) but at some point in that brief conversation it occurred to me to stop trying. Stop reaching for the karmic loop I was sure the Camino would help me complete. Stop digging for just the right questions and intentions for Life to answer in this ancient place. Let it all go and just walk.
Sure, why not?
Impossible
Minutes later I had the impulse to leave Rachael and walk on my own for a while: a grueling climb up gravely switchbacks during which I couldn’t focus on anything but the next little stretch (and ideally putting some distance between myself and a youthful fivesome who were - somehow! - smoking, playing music and bantering loudly, even on this crazy hill). Every now and again I stopped to breathe, sip water, look up. Even with the landscapes that had brought me to tears in the previous days, this was next-level.
A few folks from our group met up at the next rest stop. After a snack, water refill and bathroom break, I again found I wanted to continue on my own. This turned into three or four hours of a relatively gentle climb along a wide, paved path. I passed within arm’s reach of herds of sheep and horses gnawing grass determinedly on the vast, fenceless slopes, as if they were being paid to do so. I giggled as the warm, insistent wind threatened to send me rolling down one of those slopes; as it whistled through my hiking poles, making music worse than a second-grade recorder concert.
The world—including other mountain peaks—kept falling farther below me. In spite of the hundreds of pilgrims passing this way on this day, for most of the time I was completely alone.
Still, in all this blissful empty space, I can’t recall having a single insight—or even a simple thought apart from “what the hell?” in response to what I was seeing. When my gaze lingered too long on the ground in front of me, some voice (mine?) said “Look up.” I did. I took it in. It was impossible. It was stupid. It was real.
Mildly uncomfortable
It was a long-ass day. I got tired. Between moments of wonder, I wondered how much farther til the end, where the others were, what would be for dinner that night. A deeply familiar feeling: what’s next? What is there to look forward to beyond the mildly uncomfortable now? Maybe because the day’s finish line remained impossibly far away, I was forced, again and again, to return to where I was. To look up.
Again and again, whatever discomfort my mind latched onto—existential or otherwise—was replaced by immediate, choking awe.
It continued this way for the remainder of those 26 kilometers over the mountain. It continued for the next six days I’d spend with the group and the additional two on my own. Take a few steps. Look up. Repeat.
And now I am home, having descended the figurative mountain that was the trip. Just before the walk I’d quit my job, left the life that had been mine for a dozen years. I expected to arrive back fueled by whatever life-changing revelation and physical robustness I’d found on the walk, and hit the ground running building my new living.
What I brought back
As it is, I came home with Covid, laid up for yet another week (and counting!) with bone-crushing exhaustion. Tons of time to process the previous weeks and yet, thanks to the brain fog, those life-solving insights (or any deep thoughts at all) still elude me. And oh, the anxiety, because I was supposed to be up to something very different now! (Was I?)
The day on the mountain comes back, interrupts the loops of despair. It reminds me that right now, reality is as simple as it was then. It’s not about taking the next step, but about about staying still, staying hydrated, staying away from other people. The reality, once again, is that I am, at worst, mildly uncomfortable. Sure, there’s stuff ahead for me, and there are kilometers of life between here and there.
Look up, that same voice says. And there is the magnificent eugenia tree outside my window and the stories-high bamboo beyond it, filtering the sunlight in spectacular ways no matter the season or time of day. Look up, and there are my two little dogs, my faithful nurses, curled and stretched in those rays of light. Look up, and there’s a closet full of (too many) clothes, a shelf full of (too many) books. A phone full of well wishes. A fridge full of food. A life full of love. A goddamn miraculous island in this broken world.
It’s my bedroom, not the Pyrenees, yet the awe is the same: What the hell? Am I tripping? How am I this lucky?
It’s impossible. It’s stupid. It’s real.
That might be the thunderclap, my friends. The universe snapping its fingers in my face. Look up. Look. The trip was epic, yes, but the lesson, at least this one, is almost foolishly simple.
