The impossibility of description
Many of the readings we did over the past few weeks touched upon the impossibility of describing a Camino experience. It's a phenomenon I'm beginning to realize is all too true as I return to the "real world" and attempt to tell my friends and family what exactly I spent the past week doing.
It's already a nebulous, complicated thing: lots of people choosing, for one reason or another, to spend a certain amount of time walking to a place when they could otherwise take a bus, train, or plane. Our brains, outside of the Camino, don't run anywhere near the pace they do while on the trail--where else would an hour pass but only feel like a few minutes?
The communitas, or sense of community among the pilgrims on the trail, is also difficult to capture. Sure, I can explain the objective facts of my interactions with my fellow travelers: where they were from, where they started on the Camino, and why they were doing it (or why they said they were doing it), but I can't describe how the conversations I had with them made me feel.
For these reasons, I fear that my attempts at describing what the Camino was like all fall short of reality: I slip into using words like "awesome" or "amazing" instead of being able to describe the calm rhythm of traversing the countryside, one tiny village sliding into the next seamlessly. Like I mentioned above, I fail at communicating the vulnerability running below the surface of every interaction I had with a fellow pilgrim. In short, the Camino becomes two-dimensional, and I simply can't do it justice. It is, I think, a thing to be discovered and then understood.
It's already a nebulous, complicated thing: lots of people choosing, for one reason or another, to spend a certain amount of time walking to a place when they could otherwise take a bus, train, or plane. Our brains, outside of the Camino, don't run anywhere near the pace they do while on the trail--where else would an hour pass but only feel like a few minutes?
The communitas, or sense of community among the pilgrims on the trail, is also difficult to capture. Sure, I can explain the objective facts of my interactions with my fellow travelers: where they were from, where they started on the Camino, and why they were doing it (or why they said they were doing it), but I can't describe how the conversations I had with them made me feel.
For these reasons, I fear that my attempts at describing what the Camino was like all fall short of reality: I slip into using words like "awesome" or "amazing" instead of being able to describe the calm rhythm of traversing the countryside, one tiny village sliding into the next seamlessly. Like I mentioned above, I fail at communicating the vulnerability running below the surface of every interaction I had with a fellow pilgrim. In short, the Camino becomes two-dimensional, and I simply can't do it justice. It is, I think, a thing to be discovered and then understood.
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