Learning on the “The Camino de Santiago” road
We are now in a very special situation these days with COVID. But if you look back at the times before COVID, how many new people did you meet per day on average — or per week, or per month?
I am a long time believer that the more people you meet, the wider views you can get. Of course, I don’t overlook the importance of the thorough and intimate relationship with a limited number of friends. However, sometimes quantity matters.
In 2018, I walked 800km in 30 days in Spain. It’s like the distance from San Francisco to San Diego. There are historical trails called “The Camino de Santiago” in the northern part of Spain. This trail was originally the pilgrimage trail of James, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus in the bible.
It is not like a one day hiking trip. You walk about 20 to 30 km every day for 30 days, under the strong sun, mostly no shade, in temperature as hot as 100 degrees in the summer. Oh, one more thing, you carry a 50-pound backpack all day long. You crash on an uncomfortable bunk bed at the guest houses with tens of other trekkers who smell as stinky as yourself, in sweat from long walks for days.
I had one goal for this trekking, which is to meet people on the road. I thought that talking to people with different backgrounds, different experiences, different cultures and different views would help me cultivate diverse perspectives and broaden my views.
I think, for 30 days, I interacted with more than one thousand people, some of whom I only said “Buen Camino” (which means good road in English), but I had meaningful talks with more than a hundred people. Tonight, I want to share a short conversation I had with two of those people, which has stuck with me since then.
In the evening of the second day, I had dinner with two young men from Germany at a guest house. I boasted of my “seamless” and “detailed” trekking plan to them, saying something like I will walk 30km tomorrow, which means 5 km per hour. I will start the day at 5 am, I will get to X village for a break by 9 am, I will arrive at Y village for lunch, and I will check in by 3 pm, blah, blah, blah. After I finished my lengthy itinerary full of pride, I asked them where they planned to sleep, and they said, “Ummm, actually we don’t know. We don’t know what we will run into on the road. If we see a beautiful spot, we will spend time there. So we don’t know where we will have lunch, or sleep.” I asked them again, “Don’t you have a timeline of when you will finish this 800 km trek?” and they said, “Well, we have 30 days of vacation. If we cannot finish 800 km this time, we can come back sometime in the future. The trail will always be here.”
At that moment, I felt like a clap of thunder hit me, and I was literally at a loss for words. It made me think about what a real trip should be like. “A trip should be something like they described. This is not homework. This is not a test. This is not an even Olympic competition. Instead, it is something I should completely unleash myself into. Fully enjoy micro moments until losing myself in them.”
Since then, whenever I travel, I have tried to be fully relaxed and go slowly, and when planning a trip, I only book a hotel for the first night. After that, I just enjoy where I am. I extend my stay in one place as many days as I want, and I am not bothered if I end up seeing only a few places during a two-week long trip. The most vital thing I am aiming for now is to meet and talk to many different people on the road, rather than to visit places as a box-checker.
Actually, in addition to those German guys, I learned many other things along the 800km walk. Each and every dialogue with new people has been still dancing around me and staying deep inside me as life-long and “Perpetual” wisdom. We can learn from everyone, everywhere, even if we do not seek a formal mentor-mentee program.
There is a proverb in Asia, saying that among three people on the road, there should be at least one you can learn from. I hope you will meet someone on the road to get an eye-opening moment from.
