It was never intuition
More from my most recent solo camino trip. (Info about group trips here).
And a bit of context to start: when I say “we” or “someone” or “everyone” in this story, I’m referring to the couple-few dozen folks who hung loosely together throughout the 2 weeks. The stages of the Camino are such that you run into - walk with, eat with, bunk with, get to know - more or less the same people who started out on the same day you did. After a few days I began to think of us as a kind of cohort, and a few became my very good friends.
As with my past walks, this route had a big climb-over-a-mountain day.
Months earlier, when I’d begun to plan this trip, I’d booked myself on an alternate route that skirted the high peak. But then a good friend, who’d done this walk years ago, told me it had been one of the top five days of not just her Camino, but her life. So. No way was I missing this.
Now, on the trail, we started hearing varied accounts of just how intense the mountain day would be. The prevailing guidance was to pack everything we’d need - extra snacks and water - because there were absolutely no services for something like 27 kilometers. The climb was a serious one, some said - not just a walk over a hill. Bears and wolves lived up there, we heard. Best not to go alone.
Jesus Crostini Christ, you can imagine how much my anxious little mind loved hearing about all this. I mean, I knew countless others had done it before me, and there were no actual reports of folk getting lost, mauled by bears, starving to death, or anything else nearly so dramatic or even newsworthy. In fact, the only firsthand account I had was from my friend, for whom the day had been transcendent. Still, exhaustion always makes me more susceptible to paranoia, and exhaustion featured heavily on these long days of walking.
Two days before the climb…
We arrived at the last really populated village we’d encounter for a bit. It was a good opportunity to stock up on snacks for the big day—or it would have been, had it not been a Sunday. In Spain, stores are closed on Sunday. They wouldn’t open again until long after we’d start walking the next morning.
I lightly joked about my very real panic over this. The person who would become my dearest friend on the walk (and one of my favorite people in life) assured me that she’d share her rations, which she’d wisely procured the day before. We giggled, picturing ourselves shivering behind a bolder counting out almonds to last us the night. In other words, it was a ridiculous worry.
Still, my mind chirped about how slow I tend to walk, and how even if there were supplies for sharing and safety in numbers, I’d be trailing far behind that safety all day. Part of me knew this fear was supercharged alongside my exhaustion, and that none of it was real. But whenever the territory expands, it’s harder to see where we are. It was hard to connect with a larger reality. So I prayed to be watched over. Prayed that my worry was just worry.
These mingling fears and prayers are what followed me into fitful sleep, against the backdrop of faint stomping and roars in the hotel above me as Spain won the world cup.
The day before the mountain
Sure enough, a night’s rest and a cafe con leche brought hope, and the Camino (which always provides) brought 2 open grocery stores in the next village. I overbought fruit and cookies and chocolate and nuts, relieved to have solved a problem that had been looming large in my mind, if not in objective reality. The hungry ghost of anxiety having been fed for now, I walked hard, walked blindly, through the afternoon. Though the big climb was still a day away, we were squarely in the foothills now, headed up, up, up.
I spent the last couple of hours of the day with a young Hungarian woman who’d been walking for several weeks, having started on a different route farther back than I had. She was in her 20s, in great shape, packed lighter than anyone I’d met, and walking fast.
Even for all her fitness and experience, she’d actually opted to skip the mountain and go the other way, which entailed walking to a village beyond where I’d be stopping for the night. Little anxious hamster mind noted this, wondered if meeting this woman was a sign I should have done that after all.
I had kept pace with her as we chatted, effectively blowing myself out without realizing it. By the time we parted ways at my hostel—a beautiful, sprawling property nestled on the side of the mountain—I was shattered, but as usual my thoughts were overpowering my body’s signals.
Dark
I got my room assignment, and looked forward to washing up, resting up, taking stock.
What I walked into was a darkened, smelly room with two fellows I hadn’t met yet sound asleep, and a third unpacking his stuff on the last available bottom bunk.
The problem wasn’t that they were boys - the hostels are all co-ed, folks on the Camino are by and large awesome. It was the darkness, the closeness, the fact that there was nowhere to readily sit, pull myself together, pull out my shower stuff and a change of clothes.
A tidal wave of panic overtook me then. I backed out of the room, pack and all, and plunked myself in a chair just outside the door, blind to the stunning views.
And they were stunning. It was a great place. There was even ambient music piped onto the covered porch. For some hilarious and wonderful reason, the soundtrack that hour was 80s Phil Collins. The song playing just then? “There must be some misunderstanding. There must be some kind of mistake.”
“You’re right Phil! There must be!” shrieked my addled mind. Surely that awful cave of a room was yet another sign that this was all, all wrong.
Indeed, the anxious mind-hamster was fully in charge now. The frantic little rodent dug frantically, spraying dirt everywhere. The part of me connected to the bigger truth was now completely drowned out by exhaustion and fear.
Mind-hamster directed me not to pull out a change of clothes, but rather my phone. I texted the hostel on the alternate route where I’d made my original reservation, asked if they still had a bed tonight. The owner texted back right away saying they did, said I was very welcome.
I checked the route: only 2 more hours of walking. Hamster mind, still ignoring the rest of me, insisted we had plenty of energy left for 2 hours. I started to put my socks back on, put things back in my pack.
St. Augustín
At that moment, the universe, the Camino, God or Whoever, sent Saint Augustín.
Augustín (Pronounced ow-goo-teen) is an Argentinian mensch. He was the fittest of all of us, always arriving at our stops hours before everyone else, with plenty of energy and (lucky for me today) mental clarity to spare.
Now, with only slightly less pluck than I was used to seeing (Argentina had lost the world cup to Spain the night before—and we were in Spain), he walked by me as I started vacantly out at the lawn, one sock on, weighing my decision.
“You OK?” He asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think my body is up for the mountain. I think I’m going to keep going to Polla de Allende.”
“No. You’ll be fine,” he said. Not in a mollycoddling way, not trying to convince me of anything, just stating fact. “You’re tired. You’ll feel better tomorrow. Just get some rest.”
Thinking about that now I want to cry with gratitude. Hamster mind was about to make me do something truly insane (I would find out later that those last 2 hours would have been quite grueling, even dangerous for someone as tired as me). In a few unadorned words—ones that were inaccessible to me in that moment—Augustín connected me back to a modicum of reality: just enough to make me sit there for another few beats, take a few breaths, and realize the sane thing to do was stay where I was.
As soon as I made that decision, my whole system calmed down, and I knew it was right.
I sent a last text apologizing to the kind host I’d been texting, saying I wasn’t coming after all. I showered, taking my time. I did downward dogs on the lawn, chatted with new friends, laughed at the weird roomba lawnmower that seemed to be doing nothing but flattening the grass and - were we imagining it? - trying to run us down. I called my husband. I drank a nonalcoholic beer, ate some nuts.
My roommates eventually woke from their naps. I met the awake versions of them at dinner, and they ended up being chums for the rest of the walk.
The meal itself—piles of risotto so big each individual plate could have easily fed a family—were so enormous that nobody could finish. The hostel gave us takeaway boxes (unheard of in Spain), retroactively erasing my needless worry about sufficient food for the mountain.
Indeed, one by one, sanity deleted the false fears from the last few days. As my mind quieted, I was able to feel the exquisiteness of pure, hard-earned fatigue. I slept deeply on my top bunk, my trusty earplugs blocking out the boys’ snoring.
It was never intuition
I saw now that the “signs” (the closed shops, the Hungarian woman taking the ‘safe’ route, the cave-like room, Phil Collins singing about all the mistakes I’d made) had nothing to do with intuition. It wasn’t the universe trying to get my attention and warn me off. They were simply projections of my fear: one born of an exhaustion so deep I couldn’t even register it.
This extreme situation lit up the whole neural network of this particular phenomenon. All the times in my life I’d made rash decisions based on what I thought was intuition, when really it was fear. Fear rooted in exhaustion, in overwhelm, or simply stewing in its own rich juices, basting me, choking me.
It was the hamster mind needing so badly for me to do the “safe” thing that, for most of my life, it brilliantly convinced me that fear was actually instinct. Though rationally I knew intuition lived in the body, for years and years, I’d nonetheless believed my mind’s disguise.
This insight came right. On. Time. More than all the lemon cookies and hazelnuts (and now risotto) I was packin’, this lesson turned out to be far more useful the next day, when I would finally face the actual mountain.
