Good morning. On another wonderful day, it’s actually gotten warmer again in Cracow, so that’s quite pleasant. It’s really been quite cold for me.
So the question that I posed myself the other day is, why do we like to walk? Or rather, why do we like to walk a long distance? Well, I recently watched a movie called The North.
It’s about two men, friends, I guess, at college at one point. Now they’re in their mid-thirties, and they’ve joined the game to walk from a part of Scotland in the south to Cape Wrath, I think it’s called, about 600 kilometers. Not bad, right?
And what goes on during their walk?
And they experience weather, they experience a lot of rain, the cold, but mostly they do this deep journey inside themselves, and they have some conflict, and they have a conflict between each other, and eventually it resolves itself, and they
embrace, and the film ends on a positive note. Maybe at the beginning it’s quite tedious.
You know, they’re just walking for a period of time without any principle question being posed, but eventually the question of the movie is, will a walk unfold certain parts of my being? The darker self, the shadow, according to Dr. Jung, Carl Jung.
So, why ultimately should we walk? Well, I think the very first reason, perhaps, a long walk, not a short walk. You have to spend some time, you really do, right?
There are numerous walks. The walk David and I did last year was 900 kilometers, slightly over 40 days, 2 million steps. But to be fair, the path is well known.
There is a cabin or a hostel every evening. You can have a wash, you can wash your clothes in a washing machine, but it is still arduous. It’s a difficult terrain, the Camino, as it’s called in Northern Spain.
That said, usually we walk just to be exposed to something different, our everyday life is changed, for sure, right? Because we don’t have the comforts of home.
When you’re walking, if you’ve forgotten something, your toothpaste, your toothbrush, whatever it may be, that’s it, baby, so to speak. You have to do with what you have.
So the first reason we walk is to get away from our everyday life. And then, even if you walk with another person, you do have immense period of silence, solitude, if you will, right? Then you’re forced to take the journey into the self.
And usually, as with any dirt, if you ever garden, the top soil is relatively beautiful, but then when you get down into the soil itself, it gets harder and harder, and you have to figuratively shovel more and more.
And this is the journey that goes on, right? And then you will come to a point that you hit a stone with your shovel, and you walk away at the stone, and it doesn’t seem to want to open. And this could be a myriad of things in your own life.
Perhaps you’re afraid to speak publicly, perhaps you’re afraid to form honest relationships, perhaps you’re afraid to form honest relationships with yourself, right? And you realize that you must, if you’re going to go further.
And then I think after you’ve broken free, perhaps you’ve dug out the stone, then you realize that the soil once again around the stone is relatively soft. So you have to dig through that soft soil once again to get deeper and it just goes on.
The journey to the self once you begin to dig is truly endless. And in a way, I think all of us, this is certainly includes me, I admire the monk who has spent perhaps a lifetime to get closer to the energies of God, as the Orthodox say.
The Orthodox believe, of course, that you cannot know the essence of God, but you could certainly experience his energies. So his force, if you will, can be accessed. You can have a dialogue with the energies of God.
And there are many, many analogies that are drawn when it comes to God, this concept of God itself. So obviously this is why we walk as well. We walk to be able to expose what we see as our understanding of God, Gaia and the universe, right?
This gives us a certain bit of energy. Now, you’ll probably notice people who have walked a very long distance and people that have not walked at such a distance are slightly different.
And I think the major way they are different, at least I can speak with some personal experience.
The reason that the walk made me different, in a sense, was that the things that used to truly bother me, truly bother me, perhaps the behavior of other people, the way my children act at times, the way people hold their cutlery, the way they eat,
dress, it just goes on in my case, at least, seem to be not as important. And the old adage, the only person who you can really change is yourself. That comes certainly to the fold, doesn’t it?
You learn that there is no one like me, but that said, you must learn to develop you, right?
So, how does one prepare for a walk? Well, I don’t know if I would take on the Camino as my first walk, because that’s a little bit overwhelming. But there are walks in every country that require two or three days in the mountains.
And that’s a good start as such, because you won’t have the comforts of home, and you’ll get a small taste of what actually occurs on a longer walk.
And a walk like the Camino, for instance, maybe only 15, 20, 30 percent actually finish the whole route. The whole route. And curiously, the Church, the Catholic Church, if you will, has responded to people who only walk the last 100 kilometers.
You can also get a certificate. And now I’m told they’re changing, because my certificate also claimed the mileage that I actually walked. And then David and I, after Santiago, we walked on to Finisterre, to the absolute end of the walk.
Muxia, the absolute end of the walk, another over 100 and something kilometers, right? Totaling up to the 900 I alluded to earlier. So, why do we walk?
We walk to uncover the self, and we ultimately walk to dig out those stones and have some access to the universe, right? God, Gaia or the universe. Now, curiously, I think, because we are all independent beings, none of this has to be true.
I don’t have to do this. I can live out a superficial life. I don’t have to do these things.
Because to many people I think they would pose the question, why, for the love of God, are you spending two or three months walking? Right? Why?
Why are you doing this? It’s not like running. It’s a different activity totally.
And I think, ultimately, the only answer that can be given is, it is a desire within me. I think there’s something more than my day-to-day life. Meister Eckhart called it the ground.
God is the ground. So, if we can get into that ground by one step at a time, one step at a time, then we will slowly penetrate into the soil.
So, obviously, we start out small walks, and then as the walks get longer, we have to be careful of our feet, because you will get blisters, you will get cramps in your legs, usually. And that stops many people.
At one point, I think I was taping, I was getting up two hours earlier before David awoke, to tape eight of my ten toes. It was not so much painful, but odd after a while.
And in the end, I’m a stubborn old guy, and I just pushed on through the pain in reality. So, I think that’s an element too. You have to be determined, I’m going to finish whatever this is.
And then, you’ve got to open your mind to the words that are being spoken to you from something more than you, right? And then, ultimately, you will find that reason why you walk.
And unfortunately, it’s something I will share with you, it does get a bit addictive. So, after the Camino, David and I also walked the Matsu in Taiwan, that was only 300 kilometers.
And now, next year, I’m going to walk on the Francagina, and hopefully David will join me. This is not quite the correct pronunciation, I’m sure. But it’s the walk from Canterbury to Rome.
So, from England across the channel, through France, through Switzerland, over the mountains, into Italy to Rome, supposedly 2,000 kilometers. Takes about 80 days with steady walking. So, that’s the next challenge.
We’ll see if we can pull it off. And you know what you say, you know what they say. Critical thinking is great, especially if you’re going to do some fabulous walking, long distance walking, and critical thinking is fabulous as well.
You take care. God bless. Bye bye.