There’s nothing like hiking every day for 2 months to make you realise how much every little thing you are carrying in your bag can weigh you down. Something on its own may feel like it won’t make a difference, but out a few of these things together and it quickly starts to add up! Over long distances these little items can have a huge impact, slowing you down significantly during the day and taking a physical toll on your body. It only took a few days into my hike to start to question the nessecisity of every item in my bag. In reality, I could get rid of all my clothes and hike the Camino as a nudist! Well, let’s just say thankfully for all the other pilgrims on the trail I never got to that extreme. 

On my fifth day of hiking I hobbled into the hostel to be greeted by a group of 3 other pilgrims, one person with an insanely large and very heavy 85L backpack (this actually was the person I had met before briefly at the train station), and two other people who had somehow ended up with the task of sorting through his backpack and getting rid of what he didn’t need. This was the motivation I needed to sit down and take a good look and what I had in my backpack and make some hard cuts. After some intense internal debates, I managed to cut out over 2kg, which included some items near and dear to me, my flat iron (no one should see me without this!) and one of my two non-guidebooks, The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coehlo. My cuts were not nearly as entertaining as the stuff that ended up being cut from the other guys 85L bag, which to name a couple items included a Pilates ball and a dictaphone. He ended up shipping ahead over 7kg of stuff, though still seemed adamant that he needed two iPhones and an iPad!

The more I walked the more I realised how not only did excess physical baggage significantly impede the process, but excess emotional baggage did as well. It is easy when you are walking all day to get caught up in your thoughts. Sometimes this can be positive; maybe having insights into an aspect of your life, or remembering important things like the fact that Mother’s Day is coming up and you need to remember to call home. At other times though, these thoughts can be negative and downright draining. For myself, and probably the majority of the population of the world, I seemed to love bringing up past memories and situations that had upset me and would end up stewing and rehashing them over and over in my head when there was nothing on the trail to distract me.

 I remember one day when I struggled to walk 16 km! There was no physical excuse why it took me all day to walk such a short distance, the path was flat on dirt pathways, and on other days I had easily covered 20+ km. The only difference was my emotional state, I had chose that day to rehash a confusing and challenging relationship in my life that I knew had far outrun its course, yet a large and loud part of me was not ready to admit defeat and move on. Also, trying to admit defeat and move on was made even harder by the fact that the other person refused to acknowledge my feelings that things had changed for the worse, instead playing the victim and making me feel guilty that I should feel the way I felt at all. I spent the majority of my walking time that day stuck in the past, replaying things I said or did, what things they said or did, and wondering what might be if I had done certain things differently. It was amazing to find that I was putting so much mental energy into the situation that it was draining my physical energy. As soon as I recognised that, I recognised that I needed to change it, I could not be wasting so much mental energy on rehashing the past when I was over halfway through my year off and still hadn’t made much headway with my intentions. With all the brain power that was going to waste, if I had used it more effectively I could probably have come up with a solution for world hunger in a matter of days. 

As I was cleaning out my bag, I came across the book “The Pilgrimage” by Paulo Coehlo, and though I ended up leaving this book at the hostel to reduce my pack weight, I had a quick skim through first. In this book the author describes their own Pilgrimage 30 years ago that they did, including descriptions of mental exercises for self improvement done while walking the Camino. I had been doing a couple of the exercises as a went along in order, and funnily enough just as I realised I had this negative thought process that needed to be changed, the next exercise was one designed to curb exactly that. Described as the “cruelty exercise,” it was the practice of once noticing yourself having a negative or detrimental thought digging your fingernail into your nail bed to cause pain, continuing to do so until the thought passed. The pain was meant to be a physical manifestation of the spiritual harm you were doing to yourself with these negative thoughts. Or as pshycologists would call it, using negative reinforcement to change an undesired behaviour.

While this exercise didn’t stop negative thoughts from coming, it did help me to distance myself from them and not get myself caught up in thoughts that were just rehashing the past. With this, I was able to see the situation as it existed currently; not seeing it through the lenses of the good times of the past, or rehashing the past wondering if I had said this or done this differently things would be different. As I began to see the relationship for what it was at the present time, I realised it was dying and there was nothing I could say or do to change that, especially when the other person was either in denial about the situation or was of the personality type that avoided conflict, and would rather ignore the situation until it eventually disappeared on its own than have a honest conversation.  

Growing up on a farm I had to learn the hard way, that sometimes no matter how much you love something the humane thing to do is to put it out of its suffering, rather than prolong the inevitable. I could finally see clearly the inevitable in this situation, and to put an end to my suffering I had to pull the trigger and completely cut this person out of my life. The day after I finally made this decision, I walked close to 30 km and felt like I could have kept going.