The Journey is the Destination

Here’s a confession for you.  Although I normally write what comes to me, as it comes to me, what I share with you today was actually pre-planned!  I’m just acting out-of-character every chance I get, lately.  For those of you who prefer the normal, more predictable version of me, I apologize.

Dates are important to me, and always have been.  Not just normal dates, like birthdays and anniversaries, but obscure dates, like October 12, 1983.  That’s what I refer to as our “Kissaversary”, the anniversary of the day that I finally got up the nerve to kiss the girl who would become my wife.  When my second granddaughter was born, she thoughtfully arranged to arrive on October 12, so that the day could be doubly significant for me. 

I’m sharing this with you because I want you to appreciate how significant September 22^nd is to me.  Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien know that September 22^nd is the shared birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, the unassuming heroes of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  As a seventh grader, I thought this was extremely cool, because September 22^nd was also my birthday.  More often than not, it was also Fair Day at my elementary school and junior high, the day that Albuquerque Public Schools would turn us all loose early to attend the New Mexico State Fair.  I was convinced that this was the universe’s way of confirming that I’d been born on a fortuitous day, sitting precariously atop that magical moment when summer becomes fall.

I turn 55 today.  That hardly seems possible, unless I care to acknowledge the distinctly middle-aged guy that stares back at me from the mirror each day.  On this particular birthday, however, I’m not overly focused on my age, or on what I have or haven’t achieved, or even on what I’m going to have for my birthday dinner tonight.  Instead, my thoughts are not on this birthday, but on where I plan to be on September 22, 2020, two years from now.

While freely acknowledging that plans are fluid, tentative things at best, here’s what I

intend:  On that day, a Tuesday, I will lace up my boots, shoulder my pack, and set out down the cobblestone streets of St. Jean Pied-de-Port in France, taking my first steps down the pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago.  I bought the backpack itself just a few short weeks ago, and I think I know which hat I’ll be wearing.  I wonder if I’ll use my iPod, and if I do, what music will I choose?  I often wonder if I’ll have gathered the courage to shave my head by then, because my scalp has recently decided to embrace the heritage of the Williams side of my family, shedding hair at a rather alarming rate.  Hopefully, I’ll have dropped about 17 pounds by then, which would allow me to carry my fully loaded pack without weighing much more than I do today without a backpack.  I can see where that could be helpful. 

Photo credit - Unknown

I think I focus on questions like that because I can wrap my mind around them, whereas the larger questions are harder for me to grasp.  Much harder.  The biggest question is also the most obvious.  Why? 

It’s worth asking.  Why would I walk five hundred miles or more across northern Spain, to arrive at a church where a saint might be buried?  I’m not Catholic.  I’m not really even a good conservative Protestant.  I’m not a hard-core distance walker.  I’m certainly not an international traveler.  So why, then?

I’m called.  To paraphrase a t-shirt I saw on Pinterest, “The Camino calls, and I must go.”  Over the past few weeks, I’ve wrestled with this answer.  While true, “I’m called” isn’t enough for me.  It feels like an evasion, more than an answer.  I want to know why I’m called.  Maybe I’m a bit weird, (DUH!), but if I’m compelled to do something so out-of-character, I want to understand why.

I’ve tried some standard answers.  I know it will be transformative.  I know it will give me an opportunity to re-assess my values.  It will come as we move into a very different chapter of our lives, and it will help me put these changes in perspective.  Here’s the problem I’ve encountered, though.  While all these statements are true, none of them address the real reason I want to do this.

It’s the journey itself that compels me.

Most people who walk the Camino from St. Jean do so in just over a month.  Many consider a walk of thirty-three days to be the ideal – a day for each year of Christ’s life.  Forty days is also considered a good number, because the number 40 is a favorite in the Bible.  To achieve this, a pilgrim needs to average roughly 25 kilometers, (or 15 miles), every day.  You need to keep your head down, focus on the destination for the day, and just keep walking.

Even before I knew I would be walking the Camino, I knew I wouldn’t walk it in that way.  For me, fully realizing the experience of the Camino requires taking the time to savor it.  For me, it is less about arriving at an ancient cathedral by a specific date, and far more about experiencing the fullness of the journey.  At the risk of sounding like a cliché, I need to be able to stop and smell the flowers, and photograph them, and talk to the old man who’s growing the flowers, and then follow the old man as he takes me to see the tiny family chapel that his great-grandfather built, and, and, and…

If I’m not going to do that, then what’s the point?

Don’t get me wrong – I want to arrive at the Cathedral in Santiago de Compestela, to attend the pilgrim’s mass and see the Botafumeiro, the giant incense burner that they swing through the transept of the great church.  That matters, yes, but no more so than a hundred other moments I will experience along the way.  If it was that final destination that mattered above all, I would start closer, and waste less time getting there.  I certainly wouldn’t consider continuing my walk beyond Santiago de Compestela to Cape Finisterre, once considered to be the literal end of the earth.  (Why would I limit myself to saying, “I walked almost all the way across Spain,” when a mere 90 kilometers more allows me to simply say, “I walked across Spain.”)  I definitely would not acknowledge that I’ll probably keep walking from Finisterre to Muxia, the final point of Tom’s journey in The Way.  And from there?  I don’t know.  To be honest, none of these places are the destination.  Waypoints, maybe, but not the destination.

But then, the journey is always what has captivated me.

Talk about a statement that seems out of character!

You see, a birthday isn’t the only thing I share with Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.  If prior lifetimes are a real thing, then I was probably a hobbit in a past life.  I like my comfortable home, and my favorite chair, and my books, and my comfy slippers, and my coffee cup, and my artwork, and all my beautiful things.  I like to know what’s going to happen next, and I don’t particularly like surprises.  Ask my wife, who most certainly has gypsy blood somewhere in her past, and she’ll tell you – I don’t go on adventures.  That being said, I’ve always dreamed of them.

Some of my earliest memories are of watching Star Trek with my mom.  The original series, before it was canceled.  It captivated me.  I also remember sitting in front of the television, spellbound, watching Neil Armstrong step out onto the moon.  As I grew, so did the list of shows and movies that spoke to something inside me:  Lost in Space, Fantastic Voyage, Space 1999, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, 2001 – A Space Odyssey, and, of course, Star Trek in all its various incarnations.  Books captivated me, as well.  Tolkien, yes, but also the works of Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, Alan Dean Foster, Anne McCaffery…  the list was endless.  The back left pocket of my jeans always wore out even faster than the knees, because I always had a book in my pocket.

When I discovered the world of plastic models, I started building models of every spacecraft and starship I could find.  As a teenager, my ceiling was crowded with Constitution-class starships and Klingon battle cruisers, X-wing Fighters and Colonial Vipers, Cylon Raiders and space stations.  Few of those models survived into adulthood, but as I neared 30 the world of “collectible” (translated: over-priced) miniatures started to appear, and I started to replace long-lost plastic models with pre-built diecasts.  To be blunt, it was an obsession.

As I’ve been in this recent phase of self-examination, I’ve found this to an interesting anomaly.  For a story to be particularly interesting to me, it had to be about the people; about their relationships, their flaws, their ways of overcoming challenges.  Without the “human” element, the technology wasn’t that interesting.  And yet, what I have collected are the representations of the vessels from these stories.  It seemed kind of strange.

As it turns out, it really isn’t that strange at all.  A week or so ago, I was contemplating all the miniature starships and other fantastic vehicles on the shelves in my Nerd Cave.  (Yes, I have a Nerd Cave.  Is that really surprising to you?)  In a moment of clarity, I realized why these things matter so much to me.  The U.S.S. Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, the Apollo 11 lunar lander, even the Yellow Submarine – these are what enabled the protagonists to go on their journeys!  In that moment I realized that the common element in all these things was the Journey.  (Yeah, I know.  Duh.)

My love of starships is directly connected to my more recent compulsion to photograph stacked stones along hidden trails.  It’s related to my fascination with signposts and spray-painted yellow arrows, and even with well-worn pairs of hiking boots.  It seems that I have been fascinated by the idea of the Journey, even when I was only four years old.  Hmm.  And it was always, always, more about the journey than about the destination. 

So here I am, turning 55 today, and I’m already planning my 57^th birthday.  I’m trying not to overthink it, because there are SO many obstacles and challenges to work through between today and that day.  If I were to let them, those obstacles could discourage me.  Or… I could recognize that those obstacles are waypoints, too.  Funny, how a simple change in perspective can alter how we perceive the world.

Two days from now, I’ll set out on my most ambitious walk yet, a roughly 10-mile loop that climbs to the top of the ridgelines overlooking Santa Fe.  There’s a lot of UP – the trail climbs 1,555 feet, and then I have to come back down that far, as well.  It will be hard, and yet, I know that this walk represents a fairly easy day on the Camino.  I know a local woman who walked the Camino a few years ago, and she would walk this same trail twice in a day when she was training.  That could be intimidating, but interestingly enough, it’s not.  It’s part of the journey.

I finished writing this last night – or so I thought.  This morning, though, I realized that I had one more thing to say.  “The journey is the destination” isn’t just how I’m approaching my upcoming walk on the Camino.  Over the past few years, this has become my approach to life as a whole, and my life is richer for it.  When I opened my journal to start writing yesterday, I landed on a page written roughly eight and a half years ago.  Curious, I started reading.  As I read through the pages and moved forward in time, I saw times where I had been content, but more often, I was lost and frustrated.  I was acutely aware that I hadn’t “arrived,” that I wasn’t achieving ill-defined goals.  In hindsight, I think I was missing the point.

My focus has shifted since that time.  I tend to be far more aware of the present moment now, to notice it and savor it.  Although there are days where I slip back into old habits, they are the exception now, not the rule.  Here’s what I find fascinating about this:  In letting go of my obsession with “arriving,” and learning to enjoy the journey itself, my vision of where I am going has become infinitely clearer.  I’m still not sure why that is, but it’s pretty darn cool.