Walking, Thinking
In the morning I got an email from someone with whom I have had a challenging business and personal relationship. This person, Pat, let us say, had just done something with implications against my financial interests, and it contradicted without comment my earlier guidance, was mathematically incorrect and logically flawed, and was not compliant with federal law. I felt a brief annoyance, and then I found myself, to my surprise, feeling love and compassion. I even found that I was letting go of the money involved.
This was all at the conscious level. The conditioned mind, the reactive mind, is not so easily quieted. Decades of conditioning to anticipate (and sometimes imagine or create) problems would not be so easily undone. For many kilometers, as we walked in the dark and into the dawn, I watched my mind working through a resolution to the problem.
I think my gift and my burden are often one and the same. I can see strategically far down the road, see the implications of each possible course of action and response, creatively work out contingency plans, and even start executing on all those plans – but the cost is a mind full of wires and cables and blinking lights and barbells and ropes, not to mention dusty chalkboards and painstakingly handcrafted chess sets.
So I would note the moon, nearly full overhead, and Venus next to it, and the mist rising off the farmland, and the shadows of the trees around us, and then I would notice that my mind had, without so much as a by-your-leave, gone back to gnawing at its little nut. But damned if it wasn’t making progress. Over the next few hours, it had formulated an entire email response – though the mind – choose your metaphor — fueled by the energy of the relationship, or stuck in old neural pathways or addictive dynamics, went through a great deal of unnecessary repetition. Perversely, it was mindless.
And the solution came at the cost of my being fully present to what was going on around me. It’s neither possible nor desirable to be always fully present; sometimes we have to think, analyze, plan. The problem is when we keep planning and thinking long beyond what’s necessary, with increasingly diminishing returns.
I was also thinking of how to ensure I would be able to sign the closing documents on my house, in Bend, Oregon, while walking through increasingly rural Spain. I mulled over the situation. The closing was on Friday. I needed to make an electronic signature on the closing documents. This required Internet access. But I knew I had to be running low on Internet. Vodafone was unable to tell me how much Internet I had left, so I was conserving all I could, and by now had stopped using the Vodafone USB dongle (a vaguely obscene term) entirely. What if the Vodafone ran out even as I logged on to find out when the documents could come? What if, as in two towns already, Vodafone got no reception at all? Could it screw up the entire deal?
Every day we walk almost due west, and mostly before noon. If the sun is behind us or slightly to the left, we are on the right path. If it’s more to the left side, then we are either late or we are off-course, going too far to the south. I have a farmer’s tan with an emphasis on my neck and left side.
I thought of Julio, and how he said his English colleagues in London would take him golfing with them, and how he’d throw his clubs for yards. A good walk spoiled indeed! I would pay serious money to see Julio golf, or rather not-golf.
Galicia has few towns and almost no cities so far on the Camino. There are no churches to duck into. There are no water fountains that look as if they’d been there for centuries because, so far, there are none at all. The albergues often have no Internet. The Galicians along the Camino seem to have concealed their grocery stores from the prying eyes of pilgrims trying to save money or diversify their diet; we still have not seen one. Galicia is just a different ball game.
When I was a freshman in high school, and still barely over five feet tall, our tallest teacher, Mr. Unzicker, had sidled up to me in the hallway as I walked. “Geez,” he said, “you take some pretty big steps for such a little guy.” I’ve always walked quickly. I suppose I thought I had a lot of ground to cover, and no time to waste.
Now I walk slowly, for the first time in my life, because I have no choice. I must walk at the pace of my companions. Surely it’s been good for me not to feel competitive with other walkers. We are always falling behind or getting passed. From this uncharacteristic position I walk, and not only that, I walk without checking a cell phone.
On occasion, a very rare occasion, an attractive single woman passes, and, startlingly, she is permitted to walk ahead unmolested. In the same way that you can discern signals in a dream that tell you that you are dreaming, this is how I know I’m not in real life.
Walking With Passion
I thought of the man who was walking with his daughter’s ashes. Now there is a purpose. He is said to cover 75 kilometers a day, which, at the punishing pace Julio and I have set on a few occasions, would take him at least 10.5 hours of pure walking per day, not counting water, food, or equipment breaks. Thirteen hours a day, minimum, is probably more realistic.
I’m not a father, but I wonder if, when he walks, he imagines, like the phantom memory of an amputated limb, a slight weight on his shoulders, imagines holding in his hands the buckled leather shoes of a four-year-old girl as she squeals with delight and wraps her hands around his head. And if that is what fuels him.
Rene
We walked for many kilometers with Rene, a German massage therapist who hailed from near Leipzig, Germany. I asked him why he was on the Camino. “Because,” he said in German, “I have a goal but I don’t have the way.” His goal, he said, was to open a therapy center that employed massage, shiatsu, music, crystals, and the like. It was hard to get a loan, he said. Germany was not that progressive.
Mom and Rene chatted in German. I walked ahead to let my reactive mind burble along in its way. Besides, it was too early in the morning for German. You have to be very alert to be able to wait until the end of a very long sentence for the verb to arrive, at last, so that you can piece together what has just been said by dropping in the last, critical piece of the puzzle.
Rene had been married for 14 years before divorcing three years ago. Not long ago, his former wife had died. He was still very sad about this. He said he felt very guilty; if he hadn’t left, she might not have died. Mom was surprised to hear this from a professional healer. Didn’t he know that you can’t take responsibility for the choices people make, or for everything that happens to them? Not anymore than you can spend your energy resenting someone, which is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. He said he’d been helped by talking to Mom. “You meet everyone for a reason,” he said.
Portomarín
We crossed a very wide river bed to Portomarín. Two bridges ran side-by-side. One was perhaps twelve feet above the river bed. It looked almost Roman in its antiquity, though I’d read bridges over the river had been destroyed and rebuilt many times over the last thousand years. The other bridge, the one on which we walked, must have been 150 feet above the river. It was a great, white modern span, with a two-lane road, and from its walkway it was dizzying to look down at the moving water. We ducked into Portomarín and then found a short-cut that didn’t take us all the way through town, and soon we were climbing on a dirt and rock path for many kilometers.
At times we came upon smells that would have decimated Napoleon’s armies.
After about 9 kilometers we stopped at a stone picnic table for Second Breakfast: bread, butter, jam, cookies, apple, red pepper, water, chocolate milk.
Mom peppers her speech now with longing for these
“I’m going to miss these red peppers,” Mom said. “They’re sweet, as juicy as a fruit, and big. Lots of vitamins. It’s going to be hard to go back to those pale imitations we get from Mexico or California or wherever.”
I had to admit they were good. I actually saved my slices for dessert, eating them after the cookies. They were better than apples.
The Eagle
Ventas de Narón, Wednesday. Mom finagled me a massage from Rene. We were sitting on the patio in the albergue (also 10 Euros, but without any amenities). Rene asked where I hurt. No place in particular, I said.
He turned and looked at me not unlike an eagle examining a rabbit. His eyes are dark, and arresting. I looked back at him a while, waiting to see what he would say or do, or if his expression would change. For several long moments he looked at me, and then said, in German and to my mother, “I sense some deep-seated problems. I think I might be able to do something. I’m just not sure where they are yet.” He walked away to collect the tools of his trade.
“See?” Mom said. “He’s already able to see the deep-seated problems.”
“Mom,” I said, “it’s like a horoscope or palm reading. You can’t go wrong saying someone has deep-seated problems.”
When he came back, I told him all the places I’d had physical problems, going way back. Shinsplints (high school track). Hamstrings (college track and rugby, law school flag football). Ruptured disk in the neck (Department of Justice desk-sitting). Recently, my left hip flexor. He said he would have guessed Tourette’s. Around the time I got engaged, I said, my lower back gave out, painfully.
That, he said, was “existential”. From the lower back, that was a message: Be careful!
If he looks long enough, he said, he can also see shadows.
Shadows? I said. Like in the aura?
No. The aura folds around the body, but the shadows just lay on the body, and they get darker as he looks. Examining me again with his direct gaze, he looked suddenly displeased, knitting his dark brows together as if he’d seen a roach on my left shoulder.
He asked my mother, “What is his sun sign?”
“Wasserman,” she said. Aquarius. (Literally, as German is, “waterman”).
“Always striving to be the best,” he said. “That’s normal,” he added. He asked my rising sign.
“Scorpio.”
“Ohhh!” He looked up into the air, as if confused or distressed.
He told my mother he was going to say something, a single sentence, and that I should not be offended. I waited, and then she translated.
“High grandeur,” he said, “comes before a fall.” He went on. “Aquarius is good, but through the Scorpio, well, it’s always a little poisonous and toxic, and can lash out. From a high position, it’s easy to use the barb. But the Wasserman,” he said to Mom, “will always keep him in a high position.”
“But I have been depressed,” I said. “It’s not like I’ve lived my whole life in a high position.”
“It can be worse when depressed,” he said. “Believe me. I’m a Pisces, carrying a Ram ascending.”
He regarded me typing all this up as we spoke. “The Aquarius is the highest possible in the working field. Nothing better. Because the Aquarius carries all the other signs within itself as far as doing is concerned.”
“I wish that translated to serious money,” I joked.
“Geduld,” he said. Patience. “They’re just the best at work. That’s why,” he said to Mom, “he’s so good on his computer.”
We spread a blanket on one of the stone tables nearby, I lay on my stomach, and he set to work on my back and shoulders and neck. He was very good. He had asked me earlier how I liked massages and I’d said I liked them as painful as possible. So he was firm.
“Oh,” he said. He was on my right shoulder and upper back. “This is your work. But I think the other side will be worse. That’s the divorce. Women. Love.”
He said I worried too much about money. It took an enormous amount of energy. I agreed. Sometimes I think I’d have earned a hell of a lot more money if I’d worried less about doing so. “You don’t have to worry. It will come. It is taken care of. You are protected.”
I laughed. Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?
He worked on me some more. “He expects too much from love,” he told my mother, who was standing nearby. “Love comes, love goes.”
I asked him how he could go about defining the deeper problem. “I would need to talk to you more,” he said. He suspected it had to do with childhood. “But that’s normal,” he added. For me, he said, it had to do with sicherheit – security. “You need to live for you. Not for everyone else first. You first. If you don’t do that, you are not good for anyone else. You need to pause – you understand pause?”
“Yes.”
When we were done, he nodded at me. “At night,” he said, “it will start to work.”
Later, after he gave Carrie a massage too, he walked over and looked Mom intently in the eyes. Then he came around and did the same to me. “You are an old soul,” he said to Mom. “Him, not so much. I mean, not very young, but not so old, either.” Rene said he was an old soul too.
This annoyed me. If there was such a thing as an old soul, everything I had been given and chosen to believe had said I was one of them. My soul was one of the best, most advanced, state-of-the-art souls.
Which I suppose just proves how young it is.
Not long after the massage, Rene caught me on my laptop again. He looked displeased, and repeated that I needed to pause and not work so much. I felt self-conscious even bringing my notebook to dinner. After that I had to hide my labors from him as a child hides porn from a parent.
We offered to pay him. “No,” he said. “I get something out of it, too. That’s my payment.” We tried to buy him dinner and wine, but he only wanted salad and he doesn’t drink. He frowned and shook his head ostentatiously as the waitress read off the dessert choices to us. He told us, skinny, close-cropped Rene, that he had once weighed 90 kilograms (198 pounds) and had hair almost to his waist. This was because he was a biker and a heavy-metal aficionado, and he used to dress like it. He was still shocked that when he went to New York, in 1998, dressed up in his leather biker gear and hard-core t-shirts, with his long hair, people stared at him. “In New York!” he kept repeating. “A world city!” People had asked what band he was in.
Having been a biker, he said, had also made him a couch potato. He had never before walked farther than he could throw his helmet, and now he was paying for it: every day, as I saw, he lay in bed for two to three hours after his walk, letting his sore bones recover. He particularly liked heavy-metal ballads, especially those of a Texas band called Wasp. Had we heard of them?
No.
He found a song on his iPod and gave me the earphones. I smiled through my pain, nodding vigorously at him. I guessed that his limited English didn’t let him hear the lyrics as they really were. I couldn’t account for his admiration of the vocals and the guitar. There’s no accounting for tastes, and all bad art is sincere.
We thanked him profusely and the next morning we were gone before he awoke. He passed us in the mid-morning but did not tarry.
