Chapter 4
Every Person Carries Their Own Pace
We were a small group when we walked out of Roncesvalles.
No one had suggested that we walk together. We had simply got up at roughly the same time, put our packs on our backs, and found the first yellow arrows in the morning mist. For a while we walked as though we belonged to one another.
Then our bodies began to separate.
A tall man walked with long, unhurried strides and gradually moved further ahead. Two younger women walked quickly while talking together. Another stopped for every subject he wanted to photograph. Some drifted almost imperceptibly backwards in the group, not because they stopped, but because they walked more slowly than the rest of us.
After an hour, the group had dissolved.
No one had left it. No one had been rejected. We simply carried different paces within us.
I began to ask myself:
What is my pace?
It was a simple question, but I answered it the way I was used to answering other questions: by measuring. I had walked almost twenty-two kilometres in four hours. A little over five kilometres an hour. That seemed suitable. Not particularly fast, perhaps, but not slow either.
I turned my pace into a number before I had felt what it was like.
A few hours later, the village of Zubiri was closed because of a cherry festival. The hostel was locked, the streets empty, and I could find nowhere to stay. So I walked on. First to the next village, then a little farther. Flowers, streams, and butterflies took hold of my attention. By the time I reached Arre, I had walked almost forty kilometres.
I had found a pace, but not necessarily my own.
I did not understand that that evening. I was mainly pleased that I had managed it.
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For many years I had been used to thinking of speed as something positive.
Work had to be done. Texts had to be read. Studies had to be completed. Decisions had to be made. There was always a task waiting, and I had learned that perseverance meant continuing. When something was difficult, you could work harder. When time was short, you could work faster.
That attitude had taken me far. It had helped me through education, work, and the doctoral project. It had also made it difficult to know when I was moving beyond myself.
On the pilgrimage route, pace was visible. It appeared in the distance between people, in rucksacks growing smaller ahead of me, and in footsteps I heard approaching from behind. I could notice when I caught up with someone. I could also notice when someone passed me.
It was tempting to turn such moments into small victories and defeats.
An older woman walked faster than I did up a hill. A heavy man sat down on a bench while I continued. Two young people disappeared ahead of me, but later in the day I caught up with them at a water fountain.
No one was keeping score.
Yet the comparison was there, as readily available as the watch on my wrist. How many kilometres had I walked? How long had it taken? How far had the others come?
The way had no stopwatch. It awarded no prizes at the end of the day. The yellow arrow pointed just as patiently for the first person as for the last.
I was the one who had brought achievement with me.
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When my foot stopped me in Navarrete, the arithmetic was broken.
For three days the pack stood untouched in the hotel room. I looked at it as though it belonged to someone who would soon walk on, but I did not know whether that person was still me. My foot was bandaged. My ankle was tender. The flight home had a date, and Santiago lay several hundred kilometres away.
On the third morning I removed the bandage. The wound was clean. The ankle was no longer hot and red, but it still hurt.
I could have taken the bus.
I could have gone home.
I could also try to walk.
I put a thick dressing under my foot, wrapped an elastic bandage around the ankle, and decided on sixteen kilometres. Not twenty-five. Not as far as I could manage. Sixteen kilometres to Nájera, and then I would see.
“One day at a time,” I wrote.
It was not some great piece of wisdom about life. It was an agreement with an injured foot.
Yet there was something new in it. The plan for the whole journey had to yield to what the body could carry that day. Santiago did not disappear, but the city could no longer determine every step.
I walked along a busy tarmac road. Lorries passed close by, and several drivers sounded their horns and waved at me. Perhaps they were wishing me a good journey. Perhaps they were amused by the limping man with a staff and a rucksack. I chose to understand it as a greeting.
The staff struck the ground before the sore foot. Step, staff, step. The rhythm was not fast, but it carried me.
At Alto de San Antón the road became a lunar landscape of loose stones. Every footfall had to be chosen. The pain made it impossible to walk without thinking. I had to see where to place my foot, find support, and move my weight carefully onwards.
Along the path, other pilgrims had built small towers from the stones.
They could not have been more than a few centimetres high. Yet I could see them from a distance. Someone had stopped in the middle of the difficult terrain, bent down, and placed stone upon stone. They had turned what hindered their steps into something for the eye to rest on.
I stopped too.
Earlier, a pause had been time I lost. Now I took off my shoe, raised my foot, and drank water. I waited until the skin was dry before putting the sock on again.
It was slower this way.
It was also better.
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At the hostel in Nájera, around fifty of us slept in a former school building. There was room for a hundred. The bunk beds stood close together, and at night the room filled with snoring in every key.
One of the people who worked there sat down to look at my foot. He had no white coat, but he had seen hundreds of pilgrim feet. He said the ankle seemed better and that the wound was beginning to heal. Then he gave me some simple advice: Stop often. Take off your shoes. Raise your foot. Drink more water.
He repeated the last point several times.
I had been preoccupied with kilometres. He was preoccupied with water.
It was easy to dismiss the advice because it was so simple. I might have wished for a treatment that seemed more sophisticated and an answer that would make me well quickly. Instead, I was given four actions I had to repeat throughout the day.
Stop. Take off your shoes. Rest. Drink.
The obedience I had begun to learn in the hotel room continued in this way. Not as submission to another person’s will, but as attention to what was actually the case. The foot was sore. The body needed water. The day had a length. I could not negotiate any of these things away.
The next morning I left before sunrise.
Several of us left the hostel at the same time. In the darkness we stayed close together. Our torches moved like small lights along the way. No one spoke. When the sun rose, we stopped.
Light spread across the fields. The birds began to sing, and the colours emerged one by one. I felt a joy that almost brought me to my knees.
None of us asked how many minutes we had lost by standing still.
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In Estella I had met a Danish couple who were around seventy. He was large and heavy; she was small and quick. She arranged most things while he sat on the edge of the bed and smiled.
They too were going to Santiago, but they had no fixed date by which they had to arrive. Whether the journey took two months or three mattered little. They walked for as long as they felt like walking and stopped whenever they wished.
The man had two trekking poles. I had recently bought my first after having thought such things were for wimps. When he saw my blister, he laughed and welcomed me to the club for people with sore legs.
He also gave me a piece of philosophical advice:
It is important to stay in a good mood, because otherwise you get grumpy.
I liked him. Perhaps precisely because he was not trying to sound wise.
At first, however, there seemed to me something rather uncommitted about the way they walked. After all, they had all the time in the world. I had a return ticket and a destination. Their slowness could look like a luxury.
But which of us had really understood the way?
They did not walk at the same speed. She could have walked faster than he did, but they had found a rhythm that allowed them to remain a couple even while walking. The faster person’s body did not determine what their companionship had to endure.
There is a particular skill in being able to walk beside another person.
You have to give something up. The faster person must hold back. The slower one may feel pressure to hurry. Both must listen for a pace that belongs fully to neither of them, but arises between them.
On the way I repeatedly saw that a community was not held together primarily by a common destination. Everyone was heading west. Yet the groups dissolved. What held people together through a stage was that, for a while, they could walk in the same rhythm.
Sometimes that rhythm was silent. At other times it consisted of a conversation that found its own stride.
Then came a junction, a water fountain, or a hill. One stopped; the other continued.
“Buen Camino,” we said.
It was not a promise to stay together all the way. It was permission for each of us to continue at our own pace.
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On the way out of Grañón I fell in with several other pilgrims. We walked together without having decided to. Before long the group had dissolved, just as it had on that first morning after Roncesvalles.
This time it did not surprise me.
I walked alone through villages of only a few houses, past old pilgrim hospitals and along roads that had carried people for centuries. Later several of us met again. Someone who had passed me in the morning might be sitting at a café a few hours later. Someone I had left at a bench might have found a shortcut, or simply walked more steadily, and be standing ahead of me in the queue for the hostel.
The way kept rearranging our order.
It showed how little “ahead” and “behind” really meant.
At the foot of the Oca Mountains, the path began to climb steeply. I stopped at the benches placed along the slope. Earlier I might have used the breaks to calculate how much faster I would have to walk afterwards. Now I looked at the view while my breathing settled.
At the top, a pleasant gravel road led through the forest. Flowers grew among the trees, and the air was cooler. I had not forgotten the foot, but it was no longer merely an obstacle. It had taught me a rhythm I would not otherwise have chosen.
This is not the same as turning weakness into a gift. Pain was pain. The inflammation could have ended the journey. I would gladly have been without it.
But once it was there, I had to respond to it.
Obedience meant walking with the body I had, not the body the plan assumed.
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After Burgos came the high plain.
Many pilgrims took a bus past it. The long, straight stretches had a reputation for being boring. Little shade, few villages, and grain fields all the way to the horizon. It was difficult to draw speed from the expectation that something new would soon appear.
In Rabé de las Calzadas I shared a hostel with three people from Larvik, the neighbouring town to Sandefjord. They were walking the same eight-hundred-kilometre way as I was, but they were taking four years to do it.
One week each year.
This was their third.
I had been calculating whether I could reach Santiago before my flight left. They had made the way a recurring part of their lives. When the week was over, they went home and waited until the following year.
We visited the church and ate a simple dinner together. We came from the same country, almost the same home town, and had the same final destination. Yet our time was completely different.
I could have thought that they were not really walking the whole Camino because they divided it into sections. I could also have envied them because they were able to return. Either thought would have made my way of walking the standard.
The way asked something else:
Can you allow another person’s walk to be real even when it does not resemble your own?
I would use thirty days. They would use four years. Some began in Saint-Jean. Others began a hundred kilometres from Santiago. Some walked for God. Some walked for the body. Some walked to find an answer. Others did not know why they were there.
The same yellow arrow could point the way for all of them.
Kierkegaard’s lily of the field does not grow by measuring itself against the lily beside it. The bird of the air follows no timetable to prove that it deserves the day. Obedience lies in answering the concrete task that has been given, where one actually is.
For a pilgrim, the task may be to walk thirty kilometres.
It may also be to stop after sixteen.
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Several weeks later I met a Dutch family in Triacastela.
The man had begun his walk in the Netherlands. For ten years he had spent two weeks each summer moving closer to Santiago. Now his wife and their fifteen-year-old daughter had joined him for the final stretch.
He was fit and full of expectation. The other two were exhausted.
The next day I met them again in Sarria. His wife was sitting in the room crying while the daughter tried to comfort her. They had agreed to the journey because it meant so much to him, but they could not manage the pace and the long stages.
His wife asked me to speak to him.
I found him in the kitchen with a cup of coffee. He listened as I told him what I had seen. Then he asked what I thought he should do.
I am usually cautious about giving advice. By this point, moreover, the way had taught me that I did not know another person’s task simply because I walked in the same kind of shoes. But here the answer was simple:
Let your wife and daughter decide the pace and the length of the stages.
Take a rest day.
If you do not reach Santiago this year, you can walk the final stretch later.
He had not thought of that possibility. His gaze had been fixed on the destination. He went in to his family, and I took my coffee out into the garden.
The advice I gave him was also advice to myself.
I had walked almost forty kilometres because a village was closed. I had continued on an inflamed foot because the plane ticket and the plan lay ahead of me. I had measured my condition in kilometres and allowed my mind to set the pace for my body.
Now I was telling another man that the one with the greatest endurance should not always decide.
It was not hypocrisy. It was a realisation that had become possible only because I myself had done the opposite.
Later that same day I walked alone through Sarria. I had walked only seventeen kilometres and called it a rest stage. In a park, three older women and a man were sitting on a bench. The women talked; the man sat in silence.
I thought that in a few years I myself would be retired. What did I want those years to be like?
Now I have arrived there.
I know more about the body’s time than I did in 2009. I know that slowness is not always a choice, and that speed is not always freedom. Age can reduce the pace, but it can also make each step less subordinate to the next.
This is true of more than walking.
Children must be allowed to find their own ways, I wrote that day in Sarria. They must be allowed to choose whom they want to walk with and to set their own pace. I thought of my own father and of my own children. Respect had to go both ways.
A person can be pressed forward by love, expectation, and good intentions. We can want so much on another person’s behalf that we no longer see how hard that person is struggling to keep up.
Then pace becomes a question of responsibility.
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Every person carries their own pace.
It does not reside only in the legs. It is there in the way we perceive, in how much time we need to understand, in when we have the strength to answer, and in how often we need to withdraw. Some people find the words while they are speaking. Others must carry them for a long time before they know what they want to say.
I have since come to understand more about my own need for rhythm, predictability, and time. I did not have that understanding on the road in 2009, and I must not place it fully formed inside the man who walked there. He asked only: What is my pace?
That was question enough.
The answer was not five kilometres an hour.
My pace was the rhythm that allowed me to continue without leaving my body behind. In encounters with others, it was the rhythm that allowed them to remain themselves without having to keep up with me.
This is more difficult than it sounds. We live in groups that are constantly setting the pace: work, school, family, technology, expectations. The person who walks more slowly may experience himself as an obstacle. The person who walks faster may believe the way belongs to him.
On the Camino, the group could dissolve without the fellowship ending.
Some disappeared ahead of me. Some remained behind. Perhaps we met at the next hostel, perhaps never again. Yet we were on the same way.
The yellow arrow did not require us to arrive at the same time.
It merely pointed onwards.
I had begun the walk by asking how fast I could go. Gradually the question became another:
How can I walk in such a way that both I and the other person are able to come along?
Obedience did not begin when I followed the group.
It began when I understood that the way, too, had to be allowed to move at my pace
—and that my pace must never become a law for others.
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