Chapter 5
When the Body Sets the Limit
To explain what I mean by responsibility, I have to return to the hotel room in Navarrete.
I have already told how I arrived there: the inflamed foot, the nurse’s advice in Viana, the twenty-five kilometres I walked anyway, and the medical clinic that turned out to be closed. It was there that the body stopped me long enough for me to hear it.
But there is a difference between hearing a no and obeying it.
My feet had carried me all my life without my ever taking their side. I had treated them like loyal workers with no right to resign. As long as they did the job, I did not have to think about them. Only when every step hurt did they acquire a voice.
The body did not say:
Perhaps you ought to consider taking things a little more slowly.
It said:
No.
◆
At the clinic I had met a woman dressed in white. I pointed to my foot and tried to explain that I needed help. She shook her head. I repeated the gestures, pointed even more clearly, and shook my own head to show that something was wrong.
She still did not understand.
Only after a while did it dawn on me that she was not a healthcare worker. She was a cleaner. The clinic was closed, and there was no one there who could examine my foot.
It was a small misunderstanding, almost comic when seen from the outside. But I remember the frustration. I had a problem that was visible, I was standing in a building that was supposed to be able to help, and yet I lacked the words that could lead me to the right person.
On the way, I was the stranger.
I had money, a passport, a return ticket, and the means to stay at a hotel. My powerlessness was limited. Even so, I thought about people who arrive at an emergency clinic, a social services office, or a child welfare office in Norway without being able to make themselves understood. How easy it is to take language for granted when you yourself possess it.
The woman in white had not rejected me. She simply could not give me what I was asking for.
I went back outside and looked for somewhere to stay.
The simple hotel had a room with a bed and a bathroom. I booked three nights, took off my pack, and set it against the wall. Then I removed my shoe.
The bandage was soaked through. The wound under my foot was infected. The ankle was red, blotchy, and swollen. I cleaned the wound, cut away dead skin, pressed out pus, and applied a sterile dressing.
This is not a description of how such a wound ought to be treated. It is simply what I did, alone in a hotel bathroom in a village in Spain, while trying to hold on to the possibility of continuing.
My hands worked calmly.
My mind calculated.
How many days could I lose? How far remained? Could I take a bus over one stage? Would one rest day be enough? At what point would I have to give up in order to catch the flight home?
The body lay before me on the towel and answered none of the questions.
◆
I had spent much of my life helping others.
In child welfare and social work I had met people when their lives had become difficult. I had listened, assessed, made decisions, and tried to find actions that might lead them forward. I did not always know what was right, but the role was familiar: I was the one who was supposed to withstand the situation, keep an overview, and help.
In the hotel room, the roles were gone.
There was no client and no helper. There was only a person with an injured foot.
Of course I could treat the wound myself. I knew enough to understand that it had to be kept clean and relieved of pressure. But the most difficult thing was not the treatment. It was accepting that I was now the one who needed care.
Needing help can feel like a loss of freedom. You have to wait. You have to receive. You have to allow another person’s judgement to matter for what you had intended to do.
In Viana, the French nurse had said that she helped me out of love. I had asked what I should pay her, as though money could restore the balance between us. If I paid, I would owe her nothing. Then the help could be entered into an account and closed.
She did not want the money.
And so I had to receive.
It was a more demanding act than I had expected.
◆
On the first rest day, I set aside my walking shoes.
They stood beside the pack and looked as though they were waiting for me. I had thought of them as tools of progress. Now they rested while my foot lay raised on a pillow.
I went to the pharmacy and bought what I needed to tend the wound. The walk was short, but I moved slowly. For the rest of the day I changed the dressing several times and let the wound have air.
This was the day’s work.
Not walking.
Not experiencing.
Not getting closer to Santiago.
Tending a wound.
It is easy to say that rest is necessary. I had read that the body recovers when it is given rest. Knowledge was not the problem. The problem was that rest did not feel like an action.
When I walked, I could see the kilometres behind me. When I rested, I could not see what was being accomplished. The body’s work went on beyond the will. Skin had to close. Swelling had to subside. The inflammation had to release its grip. None of this happened faster because I exerted myself.
My task was to let it happen.
But the rest was not passive in the sense of indifference. It required me to remain still while everything in me wanted to do something.
Kierkegaard’s obedience has little in common with making oneself will-less. Rather, it begins with recognising that reality is already making a demand. The lily of the field does not negotiate with the soil in which it stands. The bird cannot decide that the wind should blow in another direction.
In the hotel room, the demand was simple:
This foot must be allowed to rest.
◆
Towards evening I went for a short walk.
Only then did I discover that the hotel stood close to the Church of Asunción de la Virgen. As I stood looking at the building, a newly married couple came out through the church door. Around them, people in festive clothes poured into the sunlight.
I stood there watching.
It was good to see happy people. My own journey had become uncertain, but the world had not stopped with me. Two people had just said yes to one another. Family and friends gathered around them. Voices, laughter, and bright clothes filled the square.
At the top of the church tower, storks had built their nests. About ten large birds lived there. They looked far too heavy to be able to fly, but one by one they lifted from the tower and carried their long bodies out over the rooftops.
I had spent the day worrying about a body that would not carry me.
Above me, the storks flew.
I stood for a long time watching them.
Then I realised I was hungry.
Just outside the hotel was a small café. The woman serving took orders by shouting them through to Pedro in the kitchen. She did not shout irritably. She almost sang, as though each order were a line in an opera. The customers laughed, and she answered in an even louder voice.
I ordered a meal and a bottle of red wine.
The Danish pilgrim’s words came back to me: It is important to stay in a good mood, because otherwise you get grumpy.
I was not grumpy that evening.
I sat among strangers, ate, and listened to the woman singing the orders to Pedro. It was not the inner stillness I had imagined before the journey. It was life continuing around me while I myself had stopped.
Perhaps that was precisely why I could hear it.
◆
On the second rest day, the foot was better.
I could see that the wound was cleaner, and the ankle was no longer as warm. It was tempting to interpret every improvement as permission to continue walking.
But I waited.
The hotel room had no books. The television and radio offered me nothing I could use. I lay with my foot raised and thought.
Childhood came first.
Then my youth, family, and friends. People I had known, choices I had made, accidents of circumstance that had led me from one place to another. It was as though the halt opened a room that the journey would otherwise have walked past.
I felt rich.
Not in money or achievements. Rich in people, experiences, and places to which I belonged. I had walked alone in Spain to leave something behind, but in the hotel room my life returned without my asking it to.
The shame I had worked with throughout the doctorate had been oriented towards the question of the vulnerable self. Now I lay there and discovered vulnerability as something entirely concrete. A small injury beneath the foot could bring an entire will to a halt. The human being I had taken for granted depended on skin, joints, water, rest, and other people’s hands.
It did not make me smaller.
It made me real.
◆
I wrote that I was standing at a crossroads.
Either the foot had to improve, or the journey had to end. I wanted to postpone the decision, but knew it was approaching. I could no longer direct my attention towards the landscape and pretend that the body was following behind.
I had to choose myself.
The phrase can sound selfish. Choosing oneself can be confused with putting oneself first, insisting on one’s rights, or shutting others out. That was not how I understood it in the hotel room.
To choose myself was to take responsibility for the person who was actually lying there.
Not the person I wanted to be: the strong pilgrim who completed what he had planned.
Not the person I thought others expected: enduring, self-reliant, and purposeful.
The person who was there: tired, uncertain, and in need of care.
For Kierkegaard, becoming oneself does not mean creating oneself out of nothing. The human being receives the self as a task. The task is not to invent a more impressive self, but to receive and answer for the life one already is.
In the hotel room, this was less solemn than the words may make it sound.
It was cleaning a wound.
Raising the foot.
Drinking water.
Waiting until the next morning before deciding.
◆
When we speak of courage, we often imagine the person who continues.
The one who defies pain, endures, and refuses to be stopped. Such courage exists. Without perseverance I would never have begun the walk, much less made it as far as Navarrete.
But perseverance can also become a way of fleeing.
As long as I walked, I did not have to ask whether it was still responsible to continue. I could call every step willpower. I could turn the pain into an opponent to be defeated.
Stopping required another kind of courage.
I had to risk the journey ending. I had to accept that the four months of training, the maps, the plane ticket, and my desire for Santiago gave me no right to finish. The way owed me nothing.
Nor was the body my enemy.
It had carried me over the Pyrenees, through rain and heat, and along old stone roads. Its no was not a betrayal of the journey. It was a boundary that made continued life—and perhaps continued walking—possible.
I did not fully understand that then.
I was simply lying on a bed trying to keep my foot raised.
◆
The next morning I carefully placed my foot on the floor.
The wound was clean. The swelling had subsided. The ankle still hurt, but the pain was different. I decided to try a short stage.
The decision was not a promise of Santiago.
It concerned sixteen kilometres.
I applied a thick dressing, wrapped support around the ankle, and put on the sock. Then I lifted the pack from the wall.
It felt heavier than before the rest days. Perhaps because I now knew that the body carrying it was not unlimited.
At the door I stopped.
I could still stay.
I could still go home.
Then I went out.
This time, rest was not a deviation I had to make up for. It had become part of the walk. The hotel room lay behind me, but the halt came with me as new knowledge in the body.
I still had to learn how to walk.
Now I also had to learn to drink, eat, wash, tend, and sleep before necessity turned into another no.
The way ahead did not begin when I took my first step out of Navarrete.
It had already begun while I lay still.
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