In the summer of 2025, with hope and luck, I’m going to return to the small French village at the foot of the Pyrenees, and I’m going to start walking. Again. I’m going to slow my heartrate down to the length of my gait, and my world will stretch no further than the next kilometer. I’ll stop in thousand-year-old chapels and centuries-old pubs. I’ll drink café con leche every morning along with fajitas patatas, a glass of juice, and a baguette in my pack for the moments of rest, to share with others while we talk about where we’re from. In the afternoons I’ll find an albergue and sit at a picnic table with a bottle of rioja and a small meal, and new friends from Italy and the Netherlands and Nigeria will join me. It’s what we do.

And like last time, I’ll tell stories, and we’ll all laugh, and I’ll be in a fine mood the entire time. Just like last time. And it will again be genuine, not some façade forced by a preoccupied mind.

It is what I should have been doing for decades. No kidding. My life would have been drastically improved had I discovered Spain ten years earlier. I suppose each of us eventually careens into life as it should be. It simply seems most people I know collided earlier than me. I read once we all live out all periods of our life; it’s just that not everyone lives them out in the same order, some aspects delayed for one reason or another. The part where I unearth what brings me peace? Very recently. But that’s no surprise; at least not to me.

***

For far too many people, life can sometimes feel like everything changes at once; as if the Gods conspire to let all the difficult aspects of life accumulate until their collective voice announces, “Now!” and all the old ways are no longer relevant, the old friends no longer available, the old hopes and dreams seem adrift on some frayed tapestry of old expectations. And you feel just past the point where good times still seem plausible. It is the proverbial edge, and many people balance on that jagged edge on a regular basis.

Such is depression. Such is the crash of anxiety. Random afflictions are certainly less random when the smallest of circumstances consistently pinch that nerve between “everything’s fine” and “everything is going to fail.” I’ve been this way before. I’ll be this way again. A lot of us have, right? The “this too shall pass” and “it is what it is” lectures do not work.

You attempt to tackle the entire list of worries, but you know you’re never going to pay all the bills, you know you’re never going to finish the projects, and you are absolutely convinced you’re never going to get the car fixed, the oven fixed, the world fixed. You suffocate in the wash of world failures too, not just your own. So you seek some form of peace, some sense of escape, no matter what it takes to find it. Reason recedes to almost a suggestion, and what seems irrational and drastic to others can somehow make perfect sense. You don’t so much “decide” anymore; and it isn’t about “giving up.” Whatever happens next is simply the only exit in what became a cattle chute void of options. No one gets it. They think you should have simply “gotten over it.” They say, “Had we known.” They say, “What a waste.” They say, “We had no idea.” “We’ve done all we can.” “I didn’t know.”

Of course not. The depressed, the anxious, the one with deep, inescapable demons is more likely than not to make you laugh, get excited about plans, is always there with a sharp and funny story. No one knows; even they don’t know.

***

St. Jean Pied de Port, France, to Santiago de Compostella, Spain, is just under nine hundred kilometers—roughly five hundred miles. If you drive, you can make it in just about eight and a half hours. If you walk it takes about six weeks. I’m a walker.

I’ve been there before. I’ll be there again. It’s what psychologists call “the value of anticipation.” We all need something to look forward to. It can’t be out of reach or near the realm of fantasy. Yet it can’t be so obtainable that achievement becomes routine. As Lily Meola sings, “It’s not big enough if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you.” Yet it can’t be too big. Yeah, life for the afflicted can be a juggling act. In broad daylight you can keep those balls going, hands down. At three a.m. there’s a tendency to hear them all crash on the floor and scatter like delusions.

Welcome to how the world is for more than ten percent of the population. They must find their own truths, despite what others expect. And they carry their own baggage filled with failures and misunderstandings like backpacks, and the best anyone can hope to do is put them down and move on. Here’s the thing: the worst part of some psychological ailments is often the inability to see past the next hour, beyond the next mile, yet the ironic solution to those very same inflictions is to decidedly and quite purposefully not see past the next hour or beyond the next mile.  

You see, when you look too far down the path, and your blinders keep out the light of hope, there is no suspense to keep you turning pages; there is no reason to anticipate the resolution. Life is anything but dynamic.

***

Basque country is my favorite part of the Camino. Navarra. It runs from St Jean south to near Pamplona, and you pass locals who still speak this rare language, and all of the ones we met before, all of them, were friendly, helpful, and hopeful for your journey, as if they each have some personal stake in your every step.

The first day is the hardest. Straight up hill for twenty miles. No kidding; a forty-five-degree angle at times. After that it levels off to just mountain hikes akin to the Catskills until Galacia, where some climbing is involved. But by then, a month later, the body doesn’t mind and the mind doesn’t doubt anymore. And the vistas and the visitors from all over the world keep your mind occupied, and after a week south of France—less maybe, four days—an unhurried pace takes over, and the entire world is arranged by where you’re going and where you “might” stay that night. Somewhere just south of Pamplona, just as the Camino bends to the west, you’ve shut down the part of the mind that begs for self-criticism and doubt, and you feel more free, lighter, but you can’t define it, not exactly. You just know it is easier to breathe; it is easier to sleep. All of the complications which haunt you dissolve. The ghosts recede.

***

Of course, our normal life can be a journey with some “hypothetical destination.” But a journey with some semblance of hope can be the difference between feeling alive and feeling dead all the time, where having an ordinary day is an extraordinary achievement.  

How many of us make plans just beyond our reach, a little past our current condition? It truly might be what saves us. Some of us anyway.

It’s well past time to change the narrative.  

It’s time to go back to Spain.