Epilogue

The Way That Continued

The Way That Found Me

The certificate said that the route was complete.

The stillness in the room said nothing.

Two days later I was sitting on the plane home. Beneath me disappeared the landscape I had spent thirty-three days walking through. What had taken the body more than a month was compressed into a few hours. Mountains, plains, villages, and forests slipped beneath the clouds without resistance. No hill slowed me. No yellow arrow told me to look for the next turn.

I was finished.

At least that was what the ticket, the certificate, and the journey home told me.

At home I put the rucksack away. The boots were cleaned. The clothes were washed. The pilgrim passport with all its stamps found its place beside the certificate. The things could be put down.

The body kept walking.

I took my daily walks, usually about ten kilometres. The roads were familiar. I knew where they led, where the hills began, and roughly how long the circuits would take. From time to time I packed my rucksack and walked thirty kilometres. Not because I had to reach anywhere in particular, but because my body missed the long rhythm.

One foot in front of the other.

The breath.

The sound of gravel.

The straps against my shoulders.

Gradually I understood that I was not walking in order to recreate the Camino. It could not be recreated. I walked because something in the pilgrimage was still working in me.

◆

Three words followed me:

Silence.

Obedience.

Joy.

I had known the words from Kierkegaard before I left. But I had known them as text, not as lived experience.

On the Way, they acquired a body.

Only after the walk did I understand the connection between the book and the Way.

During the first week I had searched for silence. I may have thought that stillness would come when the sounds around me became fewer. But in the quiet landscapes I discovered how much noise I carried within me. My thoughts continued to organise, plan, assess, and explain. I walked through stillness without being still myself.

On the high plain came obedience. Not as submission to another person’s will, but as the simple demand of the day. Get up. Pack the rucksack. Find the arrow. Walk the stage that lies before you. I asked why I was there, but the Way did not answer. It demanded only the next step.

Then came joy. It did not first arise in front of the cathedral. It had been there in a meal, a helping hand, a stranger’s face, and a body that could walk again. It came when, for a moment, I stopped measuring the day by how far I had come.

After I returned home, I tried to keep the three words separate. Silence first. Obedience next. Joy last.

The pilgrimage had almost arranged them for me that way.

But a lived life cannot always be arranged in three parts.

On my daily walks the words returned in shifting order. Some days silence was an opening. On other days it was merely emptiness. Obedience could be trust, but also resistance. Joy could come before I had understood anything at all, and disappear the moment I tried to hold on to it.

I began to sense that Kierkegaard’s three words were not rungs on a ladder. They were movements in a human life. We do not finish with one and move on to the next. We return to them, as the foot returns to the ground.

Perhaps this was what Kierkegaard called repetition.

Not that the same thing happens again, but that we return and discover that both the Way and the person walking have changed.

The Way continued into experiences I could not yet foresee.

◆

Some years later I received an autism spectrum diagnosis.

I had become an older man when the word autism was placed over a life already lived. The diagnosis did not arrive at an empty place. It arrived at a child, an adolescent, a husband, a father, a child-welfare worker, a student, a teacher, a researcher, and a professor. All of them had lived their lives without knowing the word that was now to be used to explain them.

There was a strange relief in having a name for something that for so long had had no name.

There was also pain.

The adult man could hear an explanation.

The child could hear a judgement.

As a child I had been assessed as intellectually disabled and placed in a special class. I had been made to stand in the corner and learned that the others understood something I did not. Later I had found other ways to manage. I could be the clown before someone else made me ridiculous. I could learn the rules. I could prepare. I could work hard, read, write, teach, and find my way through vast landscapes of thought.

I could draw the map in advance.

That was how I had approached the Camino too. I had learned eight hundred kilometres by heart before setting foot on the Way. I knew where I was, even though I had never been there before.

The diagnosis gave me another map.

It spoke of social communication, sensory processing, a need for predictability, intense interests, exhaustion, and masking. Much of it was recognisable. Suddenly, events that had lain scattered throughout my life could be placed beside one another.

But a map is not the landscape.

I knew this from the pilgrimage. The map could show the elevations and distances, but not how a particular morning would feel in the body. It could not show whom I would meet, what a conversation would do to me, or why a small kindness could carry an entire day.

The diagnosis could explain something of my life.

It could not live it again for me.

◆

A new pilgrimage began.

This time there was no yellow arrow on a wall. No prepared route. No pilgrims walking in the same direction. I did not know how long the journey would take, and I had no ticket with a date telling me when it would be over.

I had to reconsider an entire life already lived.

Old events returned with a different meaning. What I had called weakness might have been overload. What I had called withdrawal might have been a way of regulating myself. The need for order was perhaps not merely rigidity, but an attempt to create safety in a world that often came too fast, too loud, and too indistinctly.

At the same time, I did not want to explain everything through the diagnosis.

A human being is more than a map. I was not only autistic. I was also my history, my work, love, mistakes, responsibility, body, nature, books, and the people I had met. The diagnosis could bring the contours into sharper focus, but it could not make the life fully explained.

It took time to find this distinction.

I had been a professional for much of my life. Now I became a patient. I was accustomed to using concepts to understand other people’s experiences. Now others were authorised to use their concepts about me.

It was necessary.

It also made me uneasy.

To become a patient is to hand part of one’s story over to another person’s interpretation. You answer questions. Life is arranged into traits, functions, and criteria. What from within was a long struggle to find a liveable form can from without be described as difficulties or deviations.

I had to learn to listen to the professional language without disappearing into it.

I had to be able to say: I recognise myself in this.

And: This is too narrow.

The diagnosis explained.

The life bore witness.

Between explanation and testimony I had to find my own voice.

◆

Then Kierkegaard’s three words returned like a whirlwind.

Not calmly and neatly, as I had tried to understand them on the high plain. They came all at once and in no fixed order.

Silence could be the good stillness on a forest road. But it could also be having no words when an old memory suddenly acquired a new meaning. It could be the rest after social exhaustion, the darkness and quiet the body needed. It could be the inner room where I did not have to explain myself. But it could also be the silence a child learns when he believes he has no language the adults will understand.

I had to distinguish between the silence that opened me and the silence that closed me.

Obedience became even more difficult.

What was I to obey?

Not every explanation I was given. Not the idea that a diagnosis could tell the whole truth. Nor the wish to be someone other than who I was.

Obedience had to be a fidelity to reality.

These were my conditions. This body was overwhelmed by sound. This person could understand complex philosophical questions and at the same time struggle with what others could quickly read in a face. This life had contained both vulnerability and strength. I could not choose away what was true, but I could learn to meet it without the old judgement.

Kierkegaard links despair to not wanting to be the person one is.

For a long time I had believed that the task was to manage to be like everyone else.

Now the task became a different one: to be myself without making my difference either a source of shame or an excuse.

It was no simple obedience. It did not release me from responsibility. I could still misunderstand, hurt others, and have to apologise. A diagnosis does not make a person innocent of everything. But responsibility without understanding becomes harsh, and understanding without responsibility becomes empty.

I had to live with both.

Then came joy, but it too did not come as a reward at the end.

It could come in the midst of grief for the child who had not been understood. For a moment I could see him with greater gentleness. He was not stupid. He was not without feelings. He was not a problem to be placed in another classroom. He was a child trying to find his way without a map that fitted.

Joy could come when something fell into place without everything being explained. When I understood why nature, stillness, rhythm, reading, and writing had been so necessary. When I could stop apologising for certain needs I had spent a lifetime hiding.

This was not the joy of triumph.

It was the joy of being able to read a life with less shame.

◆

On the Camino I had learned that the body knows something the mind has not yet understood.

After the diagnosis I learned that the body also remembers what the mind has tried to explain away.

An ordinary day could cost more than others could see. Conversations, sounds, faces, interruptions, and unspoken expectations could accumulate in the body. I could function, teach, and take part, but afterward need stillness as medicine. It was easy to interpret this tiredness morally: Why can I not tolerate what others tolerate?

The diagnosis offered a different question:

What has the body been trying to tell me?

This too was a form of obedience. Not giving in to everything that was difficult, but listening before I pushed myself onward. On the Camino I had had to learn the difference between pain you can walk with and pain you have to stop for. After the diagnosis I had to learn the same difference again.

Some limits were there to be challenged.

Others were there to be respected.

No book, assessment, or professional could tell me once and for all which were which.

Realisation was therefore not an answer I received. It was a task. A slow reclaiming of my own life.

Gabriel Marcel writes about the difference between a problem and a mystery. A problem can be placed before us, examined, and perhaps solved. A mystery includes the person asking the question. I cannot stand outside my own life and regard it as a case I am to solve.

The diagnosis could be described as a problem.

My life with the diagnosis was a mystery.

I myself was part of what I was trying to understand.

That is why realisation took years.

◆

I kept walking.

Most days the walks were not dramatic. I walked familiar roads and came home at the agreed time. No one waited with a stamp. No church bells rang because I had completed the day’s circuit.

Yet these walks were a repetition of the long pilgrimage.

Not a copy.

A continuation.

Each time I went out, I took with me the life I was trying to understand. The child in the special class came along. The adolescent behind the clown mask came along. The child-welfare worker, the student, the professor, the patient, and the older man walked beside one another. None of them could be sent home. None of them was all of me.

Sometimes I carried a rucksack.

I felt the weight against my shoulders and recognised the old movement. On the Camino I had gradually learned that a rucksack was not simply to be carried. It had to be repacked. What was unnecessary had to be taken out. The weight had to be distributed. The straps had to be adjusted to the body that was actually carrying it.

So it became with the past as well.

Some of it was my responsibility.

Some of it was grief.

Some of it was other people’s judgements, which I had carried as though they were the truth about me.

Not everything could be thrown away. Nor did I want a life without weight. But I could examine what truly belonged to me and what I no longer needed to carry.

Perhaps this was realisation:

Not arriving at a final explanation.

Not making the past painless.

Not being finished with the diagnosis.

But being able to walk on with a truer relationship to what I carried.

◆

When I stood in Santiago, I thought I had arrived two days early.

Later I understood that realisation followed no itinerary.

I had spent thirty-three days walking to Santiago. It took several years to understand that I had not reached the end.

Silence, obedience, and joy had not remained behind along the Spanish Way. They followed me home. When life was later opened again by the diagnosis, they were already there. Not as finished answers, but as a way of continuing.

Silence taught me to listen for what could not immediately be explained.

Obedience taught me to meet the conditions I had not chosen for myself.

Joy taught me that a life does not have to be complete in order to be fully present in the day.

And realisation?

It did not come as the fourth word in a correct sequence.

It came slowly, in repetition. In the steps along familiar roads. In memories that acquired a different meaning. In the resistance to being fully explained. In the gentleness toward the person I had been.

I had travelled to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port with a route I knew by heart. I had followed

the arrows westward and believed that the task was to find the Way to Santiago.

Only when the pilgrimage was over, and the next one had begun, did I understand it:

It was not I who had found the Way.

The Way had found me.