Chapter 1
The Way I Knew by Heart
I had learned the way by heart before I began to walk it.
Eight hundred kilometres lay ahead of me, from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side of the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela far to the west in Spain. I had never been there before, but the names were already familiar to me. They followed one another like points in a long sentence: Roncesvalles, Pamplona, Puente la Reina, Burgos, León, Astorga, Ponferrada, Sarria, Santiago. Between them lay distances, elevation profiles, pilgrim hostels, villages, and choices of route. I did not know how the rain over the Pyrenees would feel against my face, or how the dust of the high plains would settle on my shoes. But I knew where I was going.
That gave me peace of mind.
Or rather: it gave me a kind of peace of mind. The kind that arises when what is hard to take in is given names, when a long journey can be divided into day stages, and when the unknown can be folded into a map. I could see the whole walk from above before I had taken the first step. In that way, I could keep it at a certain distance.
At the same time, the purpose of the journey was to come closer.
Closer to what, I did not quite know. I had formulated questions for myself: What did I want from the journey? What were my expectations? What did I hope to experience? Should I keep a diary? They were sensible questions, and I took them seriously. Yet beneath them lay another question, one that could not be written quite so neatly into the plans: Was it possible to prepare for the unprepared?
For four years I had been working on my doctoral dissertation. It was about shame and sexual abuse. The work had been intellectually demanding, but it had also affected me in a way I could not simply put aside when the working day ended. The material followed me. Other people’s experiences, the words they had used, the silence around them, and my own history had become entangled with one another. In a few months I would defend the dissertation. The dissertation was approaching its conclusion, but I was not.
I needed a transition that was larger than submitting a manuscript and smaller than beginning a new life. I wanted to walk.
The idea was simple: I would spend a month on a pilgrimage and leave the shame behind along the way. Looking back, the formulation seems almost presumptuous. As though shame were an object that could be taken out of the body, carried over a mountain, and placed by the roadside. But even presumptuous thoughts can contain a genuine longing. I knew I could not think myself free of everything I had been working with. Perhaps I could walk my way towards another way of carrying it.
This was what I was preparing for.
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I had always walked a great deal. As a long-time member of the Sandefjord walking club, I was used to long walks and many steps. Even so, my body had to learn what awaited it. Three or four months before departure—my memories and my notes do not quite agree on the length of time—I began to train more systematically. I walked every day. At first without a pack, then with one. The walks gradually became longer. The shoes had to be broken in, the feet toughened, and a few kilos taken off my body.
The pack should ideally weigh no more than ten kilos—a piece of advice I found both in the books and among those who had walked before me: Do not take too much.
It is simple advice until you have to decide what “too much” means. Each item can be justified on its own. An extra garment is not heavy. A book does not weigh very much. A little added security takes up little space. But the pack adds together everything the hand excuses. It makes no distinction between what is necessary and what we merely find hard to leave behind. It answers with weight.
I bought books about the pilgrimage through the St. James Pilgrim Fellowship in Oslo. I read what others had done, what they had carried, where they had slept, and which mistakes they thought a new pilgrim should avoid. It was useful. Other people’s experience could spare me discomfort and unnecessary detours. I would be walking alone, I did not speak Spanish, and from one day to the next I did not know where I would spend the night. Under those circumstances, acquiring knowledge was hardly unreasonable.
But knowledge has an appetite of its own. One answer gives birth to another question. Once I knew how long a stage was, I wanted to know how steep it was. Once I had found a pilgrim hostel, I wanted to know what came after it. Gradually the landscape became familiar as information. I could follow the route with my eyes, from one page of the book to the next, and imagine that familiarity was the same as experience.
Of course it was not.
The French Way was often described as though it were a single clear line, but even in the books I could see that it was not entirely fixed. Pilgrim hostels opened and closed. The route was altered. Local farmers put out produce for pilgrims. Villages that had received walkers for hundreds of years changed with those who came. The way was more like a living organism than a line drawn across the terrain.
And yet it was the line that I learned.
A map has to pretend that the landscape stands still. It makes the world intelligible by leaving out what moves: the weather, the body, the people, chance. The map shows where the way goes, but not who you are when you arrive there. It can mark a climb, but says nothing about which memory will surface on the slope. It can mark a pilgrim hostel, but not the conversation that will take place at the table that evening.
That is not a flaw in the map, but a reminder of what a map is. The problem begins only when we ask it for more than direction.
I had set aside thirty-five days in the calendar. During those days I was to travel from Sandefjord to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, walk nearly eight hundred kilometres, and reach Santiago. Thirty-five boxes in a calendar are a manageable quantity. They can be counted. One day can be crossed out, and then the next. On paper, the distance could be distributed so that the arithmetic worked.
But a body is not a calendar. Rain cannot be distributed evenly. Pain follows no itinerary. An encounter with another person cannot be inserted between breakfast and the next village. I knew all this in principle. Still, I planned.
Today I look more gently on that need than I may once have done. It is easy to make fun of someone who wants control, especially when you know the outcome. You can say that life cannot be planned, that the way is made as we walk, and that we must dare to let go. All of that may be true, but it overlooks something essential: for some of us, having an overview is not a wall against the world. It is a door into it.
The map made it possible for me to leave.
Once the names, the distances, and the direction were known, I could meet everything that was not. I needed a framework strong enough to keep the unexpected from becoming mere chaos. Only later did I come to understand more about this in myself—the need for predictability, the pleasure I take in systems, the ability to remember a route, and the unease I feel when I do not know where I am. In 2009 I did not have all the words I have today. I knew only that the map calmed me.
The training walks at home also had one quality that the pilgrimage itself would not have. I came back. No matter how far I walked, the walk ended in the familiar. I could take off the pack, set down my shoes, and continue the day where I had left it. In that way the body could practise the strain without life changing direction.
The Camino would be different. Each morning I would leave a place to which I would probably never return. Every step westward would increase the distance from the starting point and reduce the distance to Santiago. I would not be walking a circuit. I would be walking away.
This one-way movement was part of the attraction. There was no shortcut back to the morning. Once a day had passed, the next had to begin where my feet happened to be. Perhaps I hoped that the inner life, too, might take on such a direction: that something could be left behind and remain there while I myself continued.
It was a beautiful thought. It was also too simple.
That does not mean I wanted a journey without surprises. On the contrary. After many years of work, study, and daily routines, I wanted to recover “the spontaneous, the sudden,” I wrote. I also wrote the word THE MOMENT in capital letters. I wanted to switch off as much of everyday routine as possible so that I could be wholly present in what was happening. I longed for that strange, timeless place where a person is not on the way to what comes next, but is there with their whole being, right here.
Even the moment had become a task.
I had turned presence into something I was supposed to succeed at. I was to walk correctly, pack correctly, use the days correctly and, if possible, be spontaneous in the correct way. I can see the comedy in this more clearly now. But I can also see the seriousness. I was trying to create an opening in a life that had grown dense with duties, research, and questions without easy answers. I simply did not know that even the desire for stillness could make noise.
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Before I left, I knew Kierkegaard’s threefold movement: silence, obedience, and joy. But I did not yet know that the way would give those words body, time, and landscape.
The first word was silence.
Before the walk, I probably thought of stillness as absence: fewer people, less work, no dissertation on the desk, no telephone demanding something, no appointments I had to keep. The way would be simple. I would walk, eat, and sleep. Once life was reduced to these basic actions, I imagined that stillness would come of its own accord.
But silence is not the same as the surroundings falling quiet.
You can leave the office and take every conversation with you. You can walk alone and still be surrounded by voices: what you should have said, what others said, what you hope will happen, and what you fear. Inner noise does not need sound. It can consist of plans.
I did not know that yet. I thought I had packed to meet the silence. In reality, I had also packed an entire apparatus for avoiding it: knowledge, goals, day stages, expectations, and an idea of what the journey was supposed to do to me.
This does not mean that the preparations were wrong. The shoes had to be broken in. The feet had to withstand the strain. The pack had to be light enough to carry. Planes and trains had to bring me to the starting point. A long walk demands respect for the concrete. But amid everything that genuinely had to be arranged, there was another urge: the desire to secure the outcome.
I did not merely want to walk the Camino. I wanted the Camino to mean something particular.
I would bring my doctoral work to an end as a personal journey. I would leave the shame behind. I would find my way back to the moment. I would experience the spontaneous. Each of these was a sincere wish. Taken together, they became almost an order I had placed with the way.
That order was never going to be delivered.
The way could not give me what I had formulated in the way I had formulated it. It could give me only what actually happened: rain when I expected a view, pain when I had planned progress, strangers when I thought I would be alone, loneliness when I longed for companionship. First it had to disturb my idea of the journey.
As I prepared at home in Sandefjord, I knew nothing of this. I knew only that the date of departure was approaching. On 18 June 2009 I was to fly from Torp to Gatwick, on to Biarritz, and from there take the train to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. The next morning the walk would begin. That was how I had made the plan.
I had even given the journey a day zero.
Day zero was the transport, the arrival, the registration, and the first night. The proper walk would not begin until I took my first step out of Saint-Jean. It was a tidy way of thinking. Everything had a beginning, and the beginning had a time on the clock.
Later, a Canadian man at the pilgrim hostel would unsettle this whole division with a simple remark: I had already travelled a long way. But for now I was still at home, and my calendar was keeping reality in order.
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There was one side of the journey I spoke about, and another I carried more quietly.
The visible side was easy to explain. I was going to walk the French Way to Santiago. It was a historic route, a physical challenge, and a month away from ordinary life. I trained, read, and planned. In that way I could talk about the walk without the conversation having to go any deeper.
The other side was about shame.
Shame is not merely the feeling of having done something wrong. It can fasten itself to us as the belief that there is something wrong with who we are. Guilt can point to an action; shame points to the self. Through my doctoral work I had encountered this distinction professionally, but professional knowledge protects no one from being affected. On the contrary, knowledge can open rooms we have previously kept closed.
I had decided to carry a small stone from home. At the iron cross, Cruz de Ferro, I would put it down. The stone would represent the shame I wanted to leave behind. It was an old pilgrim practice: people came with stones, letters, jewellery, and other small objects that carried a meaning no outsider could fully know. I would walk many hundreds of kilometres before I reached it.
The stone was small. What it represented was not.
The packing lists contained clothes, socks, shoes, plasters, and the bare necessities for the journey. Shame was not on them. Neither were the expectations, the unease, or the need for control. The heaviest things a person carries are seldom weighed before departure.
I no longer believe that one can decide to be finished with shame on a particular day at a particular cross. Yet I do not dismiss the act. Sometimes the body needs to do what thought cannot accomplish alone. Carrying a stone and putting it down is not the same as becoming free, but it can be a way of saying: I no longer want to carry this as though it belonged to me alone.
In the months before departure, that act lay far ahead on the route. I had already given it a place and a meaning. That part of the journey, too, seemed ordered. First training. Then departure. Then walking. Then the iron cross. Finally Santiago.
It is tempting to smile at the man who believed life could be arranged so neatly. I would rather try to understand him. He had worked long and hard. He was tired. He had looked into people’s experiences of violation and shame and discovered that he did not stand outside what he was studying. He needed a way through a real landscape. He needed a distance that could be measured in kilometres, and a burden that could be felt against his shoulders.
He needed to begin, even though he did not yet know what a beginning was.
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Pilgrim comes from peregrinus, the stranger, the one who is outside his own country. I liked this word before I left. I would be the stranger: alone, without Spanish, without a guaranteed place to sleep, and on a way I had never walked.
But I had done a great deal to reduce the strangeness. I had read other people’s accounts, learned the places, and studied the route. I wanted to be a stranger without being lost.
Perhaps this is how most of us enter the unknown. We open the door but keep a hand on the frame. We want change, but ask it to come in a form we recognise. We want to be surprised, but preferably by something we have approved in advance as a good surprise.
I was no different.
Even so, there was courage in those preparations that I do not want to belittle. The map was not only control. The calendar was not only compulsion. The training was not merely an escape into routine. All of it was also a way of making myself ready to leave the familiar. I was building a bridge towards something I could not see.
Knowing the way by heart did not mean that I knew it.
I knew the order of the towns, but not the distance between expectation and experience. I knew the elevation profiles, but not the weight of a wet pack. I knew where Cruz de Ferro stood, but not whether a stone could carry shame. I knew where the journey was supposed to end, but not that a person can arrive without reaching the destination.
That insight belongs to a later time. It must not be placed inside the man who packed his rucksack in the summer of 2009. He did not know that the journey would have a continuation. He did not know that the words silence, obedience, and joy would later help him read it again, or that a fourth word—realisation—would appear long after the walk was over.
He knew only that he was going to leave.
In the final days before departure, the practical preparations came to an end. The pack reached its final weight. The shoes had been broken in. The thirty-five days stood open in the calendar. The plane ticket had been bought. The route was in my head.
Finally, I took a small stone from the garden and put it in my luggage.
Then I was fully packed.
Or so I thought.
