memories Archives - Nadine Walks

A Camino Lesson, A Life Lesson: Loving and Letting Go

January 17, 2016

Harry looked at me from across the table. He wore round glasses with thick frames and a scarf was still draped around his neck. “I’m sure you’ve already answered this a lot today, but do you have plans for another Camino?”

There were about 12 of us seated around a long table, at a restaurant in Chestnut Hill. I was with the Philadelphia Area Camino group and we’d just been on a 5-mile walk, and now we were putting up our feet and grabbing a bite to eat, just like we’d do on the Camino.

I stabbed my fork through a tomato and looked back at Harry. “Honestly, I’m not sure yet.”

There had been a lot of travel talk that day, about past Caminos and future Caminos, about other places in the world we wanted to go, the things we wanted to do. These are things I think about a lot: the next place on my list, the next trail to walk.

In some ways- in many ways- it would be so easy to walk a third Camino this summer, and indeed, I might. But there are a few other things I want to do as well, one thing in particular that has been ‘on my list’ for nearly as long as I can remember: drive across the United States.

It was something my best friend and I talked about in high school. “When we graduate, lets do a cross-country trip!” We were serious about it, but not serious enough, and in any case, things changed and the plan never happened. But I’ve wanted to do it ever since. Sometimes I worry that my vision of the trip is too different, that it can no longer be the young, carefree, wide-eyed adventurous sort of trip that I’d always envisioned it would be. And of course, it can’t be, because I’m not 18 anymore, I’m not in my mid-twenties anymore either.

But the thing is, I still haven’t been to Nebraska. I still haven’t seen the Grand Canyon or followed in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s footsteps. Those were the things I wanted to do all those years ago, and I still want to do them. But now? I want so much more, because I know so much more. I want to hike and to camp and to spend time in as many National Parks as possible. And I want to drive far and wide to reach as many family and friends as I possibly can. When I was 18, nearly everyone that I knew lived in my town. Now, I have friends and family spread across the country.

(Just so you know, this is going to be a topsy-turvy, disjointed kind of post.)

I still hesitate about doing this cross-country trip for one reason: my car. I have an old car with a lot of miles on it and every single time I get inside to drive somewhere (even just a mile down the road to buy some groceries), I feel slightly stressed. I’m so alert and aware of every shudder and jerk, every creak or whirr from the engine. I’m sure it’s because I’ve recently had to have the car towed, twice in less than a month, and now I almost expect that it won’t start, or that it might stall.

Soon, it will be time for a new car. And if I’m being honest with myself, it was probably time for a new car two years ago, but for me, this is nothing new: it feels like I’ve always driven an old, slightly unreliable car.

I love the idea of taking this car (if it makes it to the summer), on this epic cross-country trip, and basically driving it until it dies on me. But that’s probably the worst idea in the world, given that I want to actually enjoy a trip like this and not be constantly stressed over the fact that the car might leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere.

The answer is, of course, to buy a new car. I started thinking about this last night, why it feels so difficult for me to say, “Okay, that’s enough, it’s time to buy something new.” My thoughts started going deeper and deeper and finally I came up with this, a statement so simple and true that I’m amazed it’s never occurred to me before:

I love things to pieces.

I’m sure I’ve known this about myself- I DO know this about myself. And yet, last night, it all seemed so remarkably clear, in a way that it never has before.

I’ve always been like this. When I was a toddler, I had this teddy bear and I loved her so much. She was already with me in my very earliest memories, I see her glued to my side in photos that I can’t remember. I carried her with me and slept with her for much, much longer than kids normally do. Her fur became matted and mangled, her nose fell off, she began to resemble something more similar to E.T. than a teddy bear. But she was so much a part of me, that she became something very real to me.

It’s not just stuffed bears, it’s other stuff too, everything: a scuffed pair of Doc Martens that I wore every day in high school and are- at this very moment- sitting underneath my bed. It’s the jobs I’ve held, the friendships and relationships I’ve had, the cars I’ve driven. I’ve watched things break down and fall apart and crumble around me, and that is how I finally walk away, because I have to. Just after I graduated high school I drove out to the parking lot across from the vacant movie theater where I used to work and watched as a wrecking ball smashed into its brick walls. I drove to a bridge just outside of Philly and parked my car and watched from a distance as The Vet- the stadium where I’d spent years watching Phillies games- imploded. I’ve owned two cars in my life and drove the first one into the ground. My mechanic handed me five twenty dollar bills. “This is how much the parts are worth.”

Others leave, I stay. I stay and I stay and I stay, and it’s because I have a deep connection to the people and places and things that I’ve learned to love. I don’t want to leave them, I don’t want to leave any of them.

And often, this quality of mine- my respect for tradition and ritual, my appreciation for the things I love, my commitment- it’s a wonderful thing. I have decades-long friendships that I cherish, an old apartment that I find beautiful and comfortable and so uniquely me, a connection to the students I work with that I recognize is very rare and special.

But there’s a problem here, too. Lately, I’ve been wanting to change some things in my life. I’m still working on what and how, but I’ve opened myself up to new opportunities and now I want more. I want to explore more, I want to do more, I want to learn more and see more. But change often requires that we let go of something, that we give up something that we’ve learned to love, and that really scares me.

I started practicing this on my first Camino- loving and letting go, loving and letting go- but I didn’t quite get the hang of it. It’s probably one reason that I went back for a second Camino, I just wanted more practice. Walking through a place and to a place and then packing up and leaving. Over and over again. Meeting people and getting to know people and feeling connected to people and leaving. Over and over again.

I got good at it on the Camino- it took me 1,000 miles, but I finally got the hang of it. But now I’m at home, and don’t they say- don’t I say- that the real journey starts when the walking ends? In the last year I’ve recognized that I am going to need to change a few things in my life if I want to ever try and go after some of my dreams. Eventually, I’ll have to leave this apartment. Eventually, I’ll have to quit my job. Eventually, I’ll have to buy a new car.

And I wonder if I could start there. If, rather than letting the car die on me a dozen more times, I could say, “I’m walking away from this now. It’s time for something new.” It’s something so small, so obvious to most people, but it feels really big to me.

I mean, maybe I’ll go back to Europe this summer and do another Camino and spend some time in France and hold onto my little clunker of a car for another year. It’s a fine option. But this weekend I spent a lot of time thinking about a different option, one where I let go of something I love in order to go after something new. I think it could be good for me.

Thanks for bearing with me, through this long, rambly post. This is one reason I love to write, even if the things I say don’t really come together well or are all about teddy bears and old cars. It just helps to get stuff out on the page, to make sense of my self and my thoughts- it helps to organize life, in a way. 🙂

Me and my car

The things we can’t leave behind: the story of my walking stick

July 31, 2015

My walking stick was my constant companion on the Camino. I thought about this a lot as I moved through my walk: the cities and towns would always change, the scenery would change, the people would change- nothing on this Camino seemed to stay the same. Nothing except my stick.

It might seem a little ridiculous- and probably is- my attachment to a piece of a large branch that I found in the woods several kilometers past Deba on my fourth day of walking the Norte. But after I spent the first hour with that stick in my hand, it felt unnatural to walk without it. And it was my companion, it was this thing that helped me, day in and day out, the thing that was always by my side, the thing that I would never, ever, leave behind. (Some people might describe an actual person in this way- a real companion- but for a solo-walker like myself, I think a walking stick takes on a pretty significant role on a long distance journey).

I didn’t actually find the stick, it was Richard, back at the beginning of the Camino when he was part of my first (but brief) Camino family. Have I already written about this? I had told the others about wanting to find a walking stick, and had spent a good part of the morning’s walk looking off to the side of the trail as we passed through wooded areas, hoping to find the perfect fallen branch. And Richard found one, cut it to my exact specifications, shaved off the ends with his pocket knife and even put a ring around the top.

The stick became so perfect to me during my walk- the oils from where my hand grasped the stick caused the wood to become smooth and shiny. The stick was straight and strong, and more than once, people mistook it for something I bought in a shop, rather than something I found in the woods.

Others on the Camino named their sticks, but I never did. Or, rather, I just called it ‘Stick’ (clever, I know). A few times it got stuck in between large rocks and it would tug me backwards. I’d feel a quick shot of panic, that the end might snap off, that my stick could get hurt in some way. “Stick!” I would exclaim, before extracting it from the rocks and moving on.

But it remained perfect, all through my Camino, all the way until the end. It pulled me forward up that last hill in Muxia, when I was tired and exhausted and finished. That stick was part of my Camino.

At some point, I knew I would take it home with me. I’d had a walking stick last year, too, one that I bought in a shop in St Jean Pied de Port, one that look remarkably like a stick you might find in the woods. I loved it, and it was incredibly hard to leave it behind in Santiago at the end of my Camino. I’d considered trying to bring it home with me, but somehow it felt right that I leave it behind.

I’m not sure what was different this year (I suspect one reason is that I walked a more difficult Camino, and the walking stick aided me so much more); in any case, I was determined to bring it home. I strategized with others, I talked with a post office employee in Santiago, I got a list of companies that could ship things throughout the world. In the end, it seemed that the easiest way to get my stick back to the US was to simply check it as a piece of luggage on my flights.

So at the airport in Santiago, I walked over to a stand that wraps and secures luggage. I presented my stick to the man working there, and he laughed. He pulled large sheets of fluorescent green cellophane from a giant roll and carefully wrapped my stick in multiple layers. I’d payed extra for a checked bag, and dropped the stick off at the check-in counter. And when I arrived in Paris, there was my stick, sitting with a few other pieces of over-sized luggage, in the corner of the baggage claim area.

It was easy, and I was delighted that I’d found a simple way to bring my stick home. So I didn’t think twice about checking it on my flight home to the US- but this time, it wasn’t quite as easy. When I made it up to the check-in counter in Paris, the man looked at my stick and said, “You want to check that?” He seemed doubtful, and then gestured over to a blue cart that was far, far across the crowded room. “Put it on there,” he said.

The cart was empty and after confirming several times with other employees that this was the over-sized luggage cart for American Airlines, I laid my stick across the cart and I walked away. I had a heavy feeling, and wondered if I would see the stick again.

So when I arrived in Philly and stood with the other passengers of my flight at the luggage carousel, I was not surprised when I didn’t see my stick. Everyone else got their luggage until it was just me, watching an empty conveyor belt circle around endlessly. A kind employee was helping me- someone who seemed genuinely concerned about my lost ‘luggage’- and he spent a lot of time checking all the possible places where my stick could have gotten held up. Finally he looked at me with sympathy. “It must still be in Paris,” he said. “You can go downstairs and file a claim.”

Arriving back home after being away for 5 weeks should have been exciting or, at the very least, a bit comforting. But instead I went home feeling like I’d left something important behind. “It’s just a stick,” I told myself. It’s one of the lessons of the Camino- that our possessions don’t actually matter that much, that we need far less than we think, it’s the experiences that count- blah blah blah (I do think all of that is important, but when you lose something that’s important to you, even if it is just a piece of wood, it’s okay to feel sad and to feel that our possessions do, in fact, matter a bit).

Things have been a whirlwind since I’ve been home. I stopped at my apartment briefly but then headed right back out for a long road trip to South Carolina, to go to a good friend’s wedding (and I just need to note: the distance I spent 9 hours driving in one day equaled the distance I spent walking for one month). It was when I was in SC that I got a flurry of emails and phone calls about my walking stick. It had been found, made it on a flight to Philly, and was now being delivered to my apartment by a driver named John. He left me a message to confirm that he would be dropping off my ‘luggage’ (when he said luggage he laughed); I called him back and he asked if he was delivering a walking stick to me. “Yes, it is a walking stick!” I told him. He said that all the guys were trying to guess what it was.

An hour later I received a text from him. “I dropped it off by the mailboxes.”

So I sent a text to my landlord, asking if they could look for it and bring it inside, keeping it safe until I made it back home.

I knew I wouldn’t feel completely settled about it all until I was back to my apartment and had that stick in my hand. I finally came home last night, and when my landlord saw me, waved me over so I could get the stick.

He handed it to me- it was definitely my stick, still wrapped in the bright green cellophane- but when I held it I instantly knew something was wrong. The stick wasn’t straight. Back in my apartment I began tearing off the wrapping, worried that I would discover that it had been snapped in two. But when I finally uncovered the stick I realized it wasn’t broken at all. It was just warped. Really, really warped.

I have to laugh about it- all the care and worry about getting that stick home with me- and now that it’s here, it’s not the same, perfect stick that I walked my Camino with. It’s no longer straight at all, but bows out at the bottom half. It’s crooked, it’s changed. It’s my stick, but it’s different.

It’s propped against the wall now, in my living room. I like that I have it back, even though now it’s simply a souvenir, no longer a fully functioning walking stick. And I suppose it’s okay that it’s changed. Part of me wonders- was it meant to be left behind all along? Or, perhaps, maybe it served its purpose, and now it’s done. Finished, retired. “You weren’t meant to walk another Camino with me,” it’s saying. “Find another adventure, and then find another stick.”