On the Way to the Way

Sitting in Reagan National Airport waiting for my flight, it struck me: I was finally leaving.
I was leaving a lot more than just my family, my church, my office, my home; I was leaving behind the world as I know it.  I was going to enter the ancient world of pilgrimage, I was going to become a Peregrino on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.  I didn't yet know what that meant, but I was struck by the rather harsh juxtaposition of travelling to Spain via air.  If walking is the most ancient and basic form of travel, flight is the most decidedly modern.  You have to go through security and customs, you have to learn all sorts of little "inside" rules, you watch everyone who is about to be crammed into a (not large enough) metal tube and ascend into the wild blue yonder, try to carve out their little space and not get involved with one another.
It was interesting to me, the most technological "advanced" mode of travel available felt... well... dehumanizing.
Maybe I've just read too much Huxley, but I couldn't help but feel that the whole thing was more than a little dystopian.  Here we are, a species that has mastered mechanical flight, and yet we're so afraid of each other.  I'm not just talking about being afraid of the lunatics who turn their underwear into bombs either.  That kind of fear is rampant enough, you feel it's effect when you have to take off your shoes and present your neat little three ounce bottles of shampoo and such in a ziploc bag.  I'm talking about the people in the boarding areas and the people you will be sitting thigh to thigh with for hours, we barely talk to each other or even make eye contact.
I'm an introvert by nature, so normally that's fine with me, but as I was on my way to the Camino, I was starting to notice things about our world that are just a little off.  Maybe it's these things that are "a little off" that it is so important to leave behind.  At any rate, the paradigm of modernity and detachment was beginning to wear thin, like too little butter over too much toast.  I wanted someone to say something, to do something that proved we were human.  I knew, if nothing else the next 8 days were going to force me into a screaming match with my humanity, my physical limitations, my spiritual resources, my ability to find and experience beauty and grace, but here I was, doing everything I could to keep that sort of experience at bay: reading my kindle, looking at my phone, checking the gate again and again, things that helped me hold on to the illusion that I was somehow still a part of the modern world, but even in that moment I could feel the ancient power of the Camino starting to rip that out of my grasp.