Prologue
The Way That Found Me
I had learned the route by heart. For eight hundred kilometres, I always knew where I was, even though I had never been there before.
A few days ago, I was out on one of my daily walks. I was walking along the Golibekken stream across the Golijordene fields, a beautiful place in Sandefjord. The stream trickled slowly and gently on my left, almost soundlessly. On my right lay Goliåkeren, an immense field of wheat. I began talking to my shadow, which was ahead of me, and said, “Fields of Gold.” Suddenly I was back on the high plains of Spain. My shadow and I and the endless fields. I could feel silence, obedience, and joy flowing through my body again.
It was in the summer of 2009 that I walked the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. That was many years ago. In the meantime, I have retired, but I still walk every day. The way did not merely find me. It will not let go of me. I believe it has actually become part of who I am.
Even now, without having to search for them, I can still recite the towns in order: Roncesvalles, Pamplona, Puente la Reina, Burgos, León, Astorga, Ponferrada, Sarria, Santiago. They are still there, like a sentence the body has never forgotten how to read aloud.
I thought I walked the Camino in the summer of 2009. And I did—eight hundred kilometres, thirty-three days on the Way out of the thirty-five I had set aside, a stone from the garden in Sandefjord, and a shame I wanted to leave behind at an iron cross in Spain. This book follows the walk step by step, but it also follows what could only be understood afterwards.
But the last thing I came to understand was something else:
The Camino went on walking within me.
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It did not happen as a revelation on one particular day. It happened slowly, in the years that followed—each time I put on my pack for an ordinary walk and felt the same rhythm return without my having summoned it. Each time a place I had never seen before nevertheless felt familiar because the body remembered something the mind had forgotten.
I began saying it to myself this way, long before I understood how true it was:
It was not I who found the way. The way found me.
This book will try to give grounds for that sentence without explaining it completely.
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By the summer of 2009, I had spent four years working on a doctoral dissertation about shame and sexual abuse. I was due to defend it in a few months. I needed an ending that was larger than submitting a manuscript and smaller than beginning a new life.
I decided to walk.
How I prepared, what I packed, and what I believed the journey would do to me belong in the chapter that follows this prologue. Here, only the paradox itself should remain, unexplained:
I learned the way before I walked it. I believed that knowledge gave me power over what lay ahead.
It did not.
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Before I left, I had read Kierkegaard’s The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. Only later did I understand that three of the words from that work—silence, obedience, and joy—described a movement I myself had lived through on the way.
A fourth word came much later, and it belongs to no particular week on the road. It belongs to everything that has happened since.
Realisation.
Not as a conclusion I reached once and for all, but as something that is still at work within me—even now, as I write this.
Kierkegaard, however, was not the only philosopher who walked with me. Heidegger’s question of what it means to be in the world, and Gadamer’s thought that understanding always begins from within a history in which we already stand, had accompanied me for a long time. On the Camino, such thoughts lost some of their bookishness. They returned in the body, in the landscape, and in encounters with other people.
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I packed my rucksack in Sandefjord with a route I knew by heart and a belief that I already knew what the journey would be about.
Before the way could find the walker, the walker tried to master the way.
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