What about on your return home Mark? Did anything change for you? The way you viewed yourself? The world? Your place in it?
Someone said to me recently, "oh cool, you are going on a holiday!" which I promptly laughed at, as bizarrely I don't see it as a holiday....More like I am Atlas with the world on his shoulders hoping to have some respite and put it down for a while
Give that mantle to someone else for once.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I know exactly what you mean about the 'holiday' reference. It never felt like the word to describe what it was for me, either before or after. When I think 'holiday', I think beach bars and sunbathing, not walking 30 km or so day in, day out for a month or so. I think for all of the words at our disposal, sometimes our social 'programming' restricts the ways in which we think. To some people, whenever you check out of the 'real world', then you are de facto on holiday, as if there isn't another alternative. It's a very categorical yes/no, black/white way of looking at the world, and for me, the experience of the Camino itself served to magnify my awareness of how limiting looking at reality in those terms can be.
I walked the
Camino Frances around this time in 2012 (and will be doing so again later this summer!), and, as with many of the previous commenters, I didn't come home transformed, I didn't have any specific 'eureka'-type moments as it relates to my life... but it did change me. It changed how I perceive of myself and those around me, and also left me with an increased awareness of the inherently subjective nature of the constructed social worlds in which we live. None of that happened instantaneously, rather it has been a gradual unfolding, both at the time and since I came home from that first Camino (I also walked part of the Camino Portugues in 2013), and I feel like I'm much better placed, psychologically-speaking, to cope with the inevitable vicissitudes of life arising from that.
One of the greatest gifts that Camino gives you as you're out there is time. By the time I settled into it - I didn't push my body too hard over the first week or so - I found that my sense of time, specifically its passage, was greatly extended. So much so that while out there I said to many people that each day felt like a week, and it really did. By, say, Tuesday evening, the previous Monday morning (yesterday!) feels very far back, much further than it ever would when at home living life at your usual pace and awareness level. And that's the key word - awareness. On the Camino, everything is new, your senses are constantly being exposed to novelty and fresh stimulus, and the effect of that can be to stop you drifting onto 'auto-pilot', with this even more pronounced if you resist the lure of mp3 players! ;-) For myself, in 2012, I was away from home for about 6 weeks, but it felt more like 6 months, and that was wonderful. In that space, you'll have a lot of thinking time. Your mind will go to places that perhaps you didn't expect. For me, I spent the first couple of days thinking about reasonably mundane matters (sports etc.!), but I did so with an awareness that I was 'clearing out' the top layer in mind, eager to see what would be underneath all the stuff that I tended to think about when at home. There's no way of knowing where that will take you, but the one certainty is it will take you somewhere, maybe to dimly lit corners of your mind that you barely knew existed prior to giving those thoughts the chance to emerge into the light. I remember friends I made in 2012, speaking over drinks in the evening, talking about how on long stretches walking alone they reached points where they had to listen to music because they found they were thinking too much, they couldn't take it, they had to drown out the inner voice. I never reached that point myself, but I totally understand the point. Imagine thinking so much that you reach a point where you think you can't think anymore or you may go crazy... That's one of the many amazing things the Camino can facilitate!
Anyway, this may not be directly relevant to your question, and I suspect I'm edging dangerously close to rambling, so I'll stop.. here!
You're going to have a wonderful experience, and I guarantee that whatever your expectations on day 1 in St Jean, by the time you reach Santiago you will have been surprised many times. It won't always be easy, but that's part of what makes it so special.
