Happiness is just a raindrop away

The Camino trail is long and hard and I think this even though I only walked it for a week. Winds strong enough to blow a hat away clean off your head, the rain coming down in bucket loads heavy enough to stick clothes to bodies like a second skin. The humidity thickens the air around you until you can see your breath in 50ish degree weather even as you have trouble drawing a full breath in; not to mention the sunburn on your neck, aching knees and blistered feet. I got off lucky with only a single huge blister in between two of my toes in an exact spot that it made it painful to walk on, but one girl in my group got so many blisters that she burned through two boxes of Band-Aids.

But you know what the really crazy thing is? This same girl who got all those blisters said she'd be willing to walk the Camino again, she even said that before we'd finished this go around! What kind of hike could do that to a body? To cause some kind of reaction inside them that makes them willing to overlook or endure such physical discomforts as these while still enjoying it enough to come back a second time. This girl in my group was not the only one, least we think that she’s an anomaly on the Camino. There was a lovely Belgian woman that I met on Day Two of my walk who told me that the year before she started walking the Camino from basically her front door all the way to Lyon, a French town that is a popular starting place for the Camino. This woman’s hometown was just northeast of Brussels, which means that she walked about 455 miles give or take last year to get to Lyon. This year she was determined to walk from Lyon to Santiago and I can happily report that she made it since I saw her there after my group made it to the Spanish city. There was an Australian couple that I bumped into on Day Three who had been planning to walk the Camino together for eleven years and when we had that conversation they had been walking it for thirty eight days. The wife said that even after all the walking her body still ached and her feet hurt, but they were so happy to be doing this that it hardly seemed like they were hurting at all.

What can all this happiness in the midst of pain and discomfort be? Where does it come from? In a world where we are constantly told that we will be happier with the more we have the Camino seems to fly in the face of that with all these people who are happy despite their lack of stuff, their lack of what many think of as modern day amenities such as Wi-Fi and constant access to social media. If we look at these people in this short post, they seem to tell us that happiness is something else entirely and that it can be caused by something as simple as going on a walk with friends. It seems to say that happiness is something that can be achieved by moving yourself through space, by sharing a few laughs with strangers, by reflecting on yourself and your surroundings instead of always thinking about the next step in the master plan or cramping your thoughts and space with yet another TV that is supposed to make you happy. In reflecting on these thoughts myself the words from one of my favorite stories about happiness comes to mind, the words from Dr. Seuss’s character The Grinch, “Maybe Christmas (or in this case happiness) doesn’t come from a store, maybe...perhaps...Christmas means a little bit more!” Happiness isn’t something you can buy in a store and if nothing else walking the Camino teaches that happiness is not much dependent on material things at all. These roads to Santiago are meant to be walked in both silence and laughter, with equal parts pain and love, even in the pouring rain.