Losing Oneself
“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
After a week or so on the Camino, I still lose my way every day.
Not profoundly. Not irreversibly so. But daily, at one point or another, I realize I’ve strayed from the path I meant to be on.
It usually happens because I’m not paying attention. I mean: the yellow arrows pointing the way are right there. But sheesh … the sun is calling my name and the sky is practically thrumming with blueness and the Atlantic waves beat such a riotous rhythm as they hurl themselves against the stones and before I know it I’m humming (Miley Cyrus’s Flowers is a wicked earworm) and then: Whoa! I’m standing in a bush. Like, literally, standing inside a massive shore bush because when the road petered out to a dirt path that petered out to a sandy strip that petered out to a gritty line I just kept walking straight while my eyes and my mind swung all the hell over the place: Is that a cowbell I hear? Look at that flower! What is that smell? Here’s a herd of goats to pet! And then there I am, tangled up in a plant in the middle of nowhere with no recourse but to backtrack and search for the turn I certainly should have taken. And there it is, clearly marked with a yellow arrow that I overlooked.
But sometimes I am paying attention, and still I can’t figure out how I wound up so far off course.
There are guidebooks for these things and I dutifully read them, committing to memory all the advice, so I wouldn’t misstep. I’ve got a freshly updated map, a map that everyone who’s been down this road before swears is reliable, and I’m diligently obeying its every instruction. I’m reading all the writing on all the walls, too, scanning for signs, feeling really confident that everything’s pointing in the right direction. I’m blissfully buzzing along, thinking the whole future is unfurling ahead of me just as planned when – oh holy hell – here’s a crossroads I didn’t expect.
Welcome to my life – yours too, on occasion, I suspect – where the things you believed you could always rely on sometimes turn out to be not that reliable after all. Goes for relationships, goes for career paths, and goes for long walks across foreign lands.
A few days ago I got tripped up when the map pointed in one direction and the Camino way-markers pointed in another. More specifically, the map pointed straight ahead and the yellow arrows hand-painted on a retaining wall told me to take two hard lefts in quick succession and commence walking right back in the direction I’d just come from. While I’m obviously no stranger to the concept of backtracking (hello, shore bush), when you’re already a good 15+ miles in I can assure you don’t want to add any additional unnecessary steps. Hence, I wasn’t keen on the idea of reversing course only, in all likelihood, to be directed back here again by the same way-markers I’d already followed in some endless loop. No thanks.
But I didn’t like the map’s suggestion either: straight ahead down a busy highway* full of fast-moving vehicles I’d already been dodging, no shoulder, jumping into a weedy ditch and watching my life flash before my eyes every time an 18-wheeler barreled past me. And as far forward as my eyes could see? More of the same.
I didn’t want to have to pick between either of these shitty choices. I wanted a better option where no better option existed. Specifically, I wanted a path that led me to the beach – which, to make matters worse, I could see but couldn’t reach, separated as I was from it by fields of thorny shrubs abutting walled private residences. I wanted to be where I couldn’t get to!!, not up by this road spinning in circles or battling my way forward against all manner of obstacles.
In a quandary, I tried to accommodate myself to the choices at hand. I followed the head-back-where-you-came-from path, but it went on and on and as far as I could see it had no outlet, so then I returned to the highway but that felt like it was going to be the death of me. In the end, I sat myself down at the crossroads and waited, figuring someone else was bound to come along eventually and maybe they’d have … I don’t know. Insider information? A better map? A better idea?
Sure enough, a married couple soon caught up with me. They were equally confused.
“Maybe we just trust the arrows and try this path?” the husband said. (Imagine the three of us, craning our necks, tipped sideways under the weight of hefty backpacks, staring dejectedly down the path that aimed back toward where we’d come from.)
“I’ve been down that path and it’s hopeless,” I said. “Total dead end.”
“Are you sure?” the man asked. “Maybe you just didn’t stick with it long enough?”
“I went far enough to see it doesn’t go anywhere.” I replied. “What else do you suggest?”
“Well,” he said slowly, gently. “Sometimes you have to walk backwards for a really long time before things turn around and you can go forward again.”
(I have transcribed this conversation verbatim. Seriously, y’all, sometimes the lessons are right there. Sometimes you don’t notice them even as you’re walking them. Sometimes it’s only on reflection that you see what was happening while you were resentfully trudging along. And also … sometimes it turns out you bump into the Buddha on the Camino.)
I commenced walking backwards with them down that intolerably long stretch of pathway yet again, this time just to prove I was right. And, as I told them, it dead-ended into a bunch of shore bush. I actually threw my hands into the air, like: See! I told you so! There’s no other way! when the man pointed to a little spit of a sandy strip off to the right – exactly the sort of thing I’d learned not to trust because I’d wound up hopelessly tangled in bushes a few times already following that kind of path – but this one had a just-big-enough swathe cut through the greenery that a girl and a backpack might squeeze through and, moreover, it had a stone sitting on the ground beside it with a little yellow arrow painted on it.
I didn’t see it before. I wouldn’t even have seen it this time if he hadn’t pointed it out to me. I was so focused on not wanting to waste the effort I’d already invested, so sure this route led nowhere, so busy ruing the road I didn’t want to be on that I didn’t see the alternate path. Believing it wasn’t there, I never gave myself a chance to see it. Believing it would be nothing but a dead end, it became for me nothing but a dead end. I’d closed my mind which closed my eyes and left me stuck when, the whole time, the way forward had been there waiting to be discovered: a small sidetrack leading to a beautiful beach.
There is a saying among pilgrims: The Camino provides. As in: Keep the faith. You get the lessons you need when you’re ready to receive them.
For today, with no small degree of help, I am back on track. Tomorrow, when I get lost again, as I surely will, I will be better prepared to right my own course. And the day after that, better still. So it goes, day-by-day, learning the lessons that bear repeating as I find my way back to myself out here.
* Only the tiniest smidge of the Camino forces you onto highways. Most of it is footpaths through vineyards and forests and along beaches and down cobblestone roads winding through adorable villages. But there are a couple of short-ish highway sections, and they are treacherous at best. Every year, a handful of pilgrims die on them. You can understand my reticence to hang out there any longer than necessary.
There really were quite a lot of goats to pet. Anyone would have been distracted by all that cuteness.