Camino de Santiago: the start of a 4-month-walk or so

the first day

My feet can’t wait to go, but they’re also nervous. Just go already, they tell me. This day is finally here. Our backpacks, they’re heavy. I have not made a single test walk with full weight on. It’s better not to know what you’re going to get into, I told myself. Just bring as little as possible. Besides, I will get strong along the way. It makes no sense to know on beforehand how heavy the bag is going to be. I’m going to have to carry it anyway. Tingles in my stomach.

While making a last round before we go, I make our bed, clean up a bit of the mess. Stack some more boxes. Six days ago we moved here, to this first floor plus the attic in the house of Joseph, the father of Kristian. He doesn’t ever come up here, nobody really does. Our stuff is left here, still in boxes and bags. We go on a walk and we don’t know when we come back. ‘Are you ready?’ asks Kristian me.

When we were preparing we went for practical and quality clothing. That’s why we wear almost the exact same outfit. Almost the same beige pants. The exact same shirt except for the color and size. And the same hat. All with built-in protection against the sun. No naked skin except for our hands, faces and - today - our feet.

This is what we will be wearing every day. Our fast-drying, cool-when-hot, warm-when-cold, anti-mosquito, no-smelling shirts with long sleeves and a collar. Who made this shirt? Who are all the people who took part in fabricating my fancy technical cloths? The shirt has small loop on the chest in between two snap buttons. It’s a loop to hang your (sun)glasses. It also has a small strip of soft cloth sewn on the inside of the bottom. To clean glasses. I never owned clothes like these before.

Pack the food, fill the water bags, don’t put on shoes, hoist the bag on the back. Open the door. Joseph rolls outside first. We follow. I push the button to close the door behind us.

We’re going to do some walking.

We follow Joseph, he is way faster than us. We don’t seem to have the same pace. He’s in front of us, leading the way, when we get too much behind he stops and waits until we catch up again. And then rolls off again, waiting at the next junction. During the whole day we follow the electric wheelchair he’s in. It’s easy, not having to navigate.

It’s a summer day, a sunny one. I’m quiet, focusing on walking with my naked feet on the asphalt. At first it’s quite strange and unfamiliar, but after a few kilometers they are warmed up. Walking bare feet, it makes us slower. The weight on my back is also making me slower. Constantly I have to scan the earth in front of me. We did some barefoot walking before, but it’s a different experience now. The surface feels warm and inviting against my soles. With each step, I try to let my foot come down with the weight of my body equally divided. The asphalt massages the soles. They are pressed into the surface.

I know I shouldn’t let my attention wander away. The paths are clean enough, there’s almost no glass or other sharp things. But still. We cross through open landscapes. Meadows, all fenced with trenches. Mostly we walk on cycle paths, alongside the motorway. It’s flat, green and endlessly straight on the same. Farms. Some eateries. We stop for fries with ketchup.

There’s a lot of weight coming down with each step. With nothing to protect my feet, I’m starting to feel like a pounding elephant more and more. Every step hurts my soles now. I try to bend my knees more to make my steps lighter. But I’m getting just too heavy. I’ll have to put on shoes.

Kristian also puts on his shoes, having the same issues. ‘At least we tried,’ he says. ‘We can try again in a few days,’ I add.

The shoulder straps are cutting into my shoulders. I tighten the hip belt, loosen the shoulder straps. I’m trying to find the balance, in vain. With my hands entwined on my back I uplift the bag. I walk a while like this, until my arms are getting tired.

At least every other hour we take a break. Eating bananas, watermelon, last night's leftover vegetable curry. We eat mostly what we brought. Nevertheless, my bag is feeling heavier and heavier. I drink, pee and sweat a lot. My shirt is starting to smell.

The soles of our shoes are very thin. They have no suspension at all. It’s all up to our own bodies to deal with the weight coming down, again and again and again. Be your own suspension, feet. As the day gets by, the surface appears harder and harder. I start walking in the bouncy grass, next to the asphalt.

‘It has begun. How do you feel about it?’ I ask Kristian.
‘It doesn’t really feel like it, yet.’ He points towards his father in front of us.
‘What do you mean with that?’ I suspect what he’s going to say.
‘My dad, it’s not for real because he’s joining us today. And because we know where we are going to sleep tonight. Tomorrow it will be different. I think maybe when we are in Belgium, it will feel more real. Today, we are just walking with my dad.’

He is right. Somehow this doesn’t feel real, yet. How could that be? Maybe it had to sunk in still. Maybe, his dad is a string that ties us to what we are trying to escape.

red pills
This was the moment we’d been looking forward to, the moment the actual hiking would begin. Kristian had been sitting on the couch for months. Doing nothing but watch the screen in front of him. Passionate people with serious faces, telling him how the world actually goes around. He fell down into the rabbit hole, he took one red pill after another. He dragged me with him. At first I struggled against it. I did not want to know about the shit in the world. I was miserable enough without this knowledge.

I begged him to help me pay the bills. Our debts were growing. ‘Go find a job!’ I told him multiple times. ‘I will,’ he said, but he never didn’t even try. His eyes glued on the screen, his hands rolling joints. Kristian couldn’t find the strength to get to work. Paralyzed, he was. I took two extra jobs. That’s how we made it for a while - that and a lot of loans from several family members. It was a ridiculous struggle.

Whenever I told Kristian to go and do something useful, he said that he was already doing so. ‘Darling, I’m educating myself. I’m learning about the world. Come, sit and watch with me’, he said. ‘Yes, but we need money’, I replied. ‘Is this going to bring in some money?’ He didn’t answer.

After a while, I got sucked into it as well. Not as much as Kristian, I didn’t have the desire to spend every waking hour watching videos made by people from all over the world in their homes. Besides, I had two jobs to juggle, plus my own business. I tagged along with what Kristian watched.

Almost everything I knew fell apart, the world as we knew it started to crumble. After that, things started to fall into place. I felt great relieve. Relieve that there was something true-er to believe in. Not necessarily the truth, but a starting point at least. A fundament on which I could stand. I felt awakened. And at the same time I got disconnected from almost everybody I knew. All of a sudden we seemed to be living in a different reality than our friends and family.

I became familiar with another layer of truth. A truth that seemed to me more true than what I believed before. I got a glimpse of an alternative truth. A truth that more and more people are susceptible to, including myself. It tells about who actually runs the world, how we are all slaves and how we willingly poison ourselves by living shit lifestyles. We’re not very different from the cows who are enslaved to us. We also get milked. In the form of mortgages, for example.

But I guess I’m different than cows and most of humanity. I don’t suffer like almost every existing cow on earth does. My life isn’t horrible. My awakening came with the realization that I have a choice. I have a choice how to live my life. Somehow I forgot this truth. I still do, sometimes. I’m not there yet.

And even though it feels that we fell by accident into the rabbit hole, there’s definitely a part of me that wanted to fall in there. That is perhaps the difference between me and most of the people I know. They seem to be too fast asleep to open their eyes. Why should they, if they’re comfortable where they’re at.

Some unconscious part of me wanted to know. I finally was ready to see things more as they are, not as they are convenient for me. Before that time, I kind of knew something was wrong. Just not wrong enough to worry. It was a barely noticeable itching on the inside of my skull. Faint, but always there. Whenever I thought about it, I said to myself ‘there’s nothing to be done about it anyway’ and/or ‘it has nothing to do with me’.

How wrong of an assumption is that. I have been living according to these two assumptions for a long time, applying them to everything. So very mistaken. Change is possible and it always has something to do with me. Why? Because I’m part of the problem, therefore I’m part of the solution. It’s all connected. Now I see. The next step is to live it. All of a sudden, I realized what immense power and influence I had, just because I exist. I drowned in all the new insights. I got snowed under all the information I had now. What do do? So many things I have to sort out. I have to start all over. Organize my thoughts, revise my habits. Some of them are too ridiculous to hold onto. Find out which. Throw some out. I’ve got so many of them.

One time Kristian came back from jogging, all excited and energized. He told me he was going to walk to Santiago de Compostela. All the way. From the Netherlands to Spain. ‘I’ll go, with or without you,’ he told me. Although I would never have come up with an idea like this, I didn’t hesitate long. ‘I’ll join you. Let’s get out of here’, I said.

So we decided to sell the house and go for a far walk. Maybe that would be better for us. We had some things to think about. Kristian needed to get off the couch.

to be continued

thank you for reading

this story follows after this introduction