Getting There

Today I started working my way towards the Camino de Santiago.  I took my backpack out of the closet, where it's been since Jack and I got back from our trip on the AT.  I loaded it up with about three quarters of what I'll eventually carry to Spain.  And I walked my normal loop around the lake.  It's a shade over two miles, a good morning walk, but this morning I noticed something: I was thinking way too much about just finishing the walk.  I thought maybe it was just the extra load, even though it wasn't anything like the load I was carrying on the AT.  Maybe it was just that I had a few other things I wanted to get done today, but as I walked I considered how I have come to experience my walk as though I'm checking things off of a list.
On the outward stretch there are a few steep little rises and falls as the trail follows the contour of the shore line.  I know exactly where the last "real" climb on the loop comes.  I also use a fitbit now, which also makes walking and moving in general a goal oriented activity.  I began to think about how, in about seven months, I will have nothing to do but walk.  I will have to walk every day, rain or shine, whether I feel like it or not.  I will need to cover about five or six times the distance of my morning walk per day, and my pack will not be optional.  It's a daunting mental situation, to know that your goal is always so far away, I'm wondering how it's going to be that first week, before I really settle into the journey.
In the background, I'm thinking about how this pilgrimage is going to shape the rest of my life and ministry.  These preparations remind me of somewhat of seminary.  I'm trying to teach my body to accept and bear the burden, I'm breaking in my boots, I'm thinking about how the Camino is going to be a challenge (I've actually even done something like a Field education on my walk from Sarria last year).  But the idea of walking for a month, with almost no other reason for being, is still a bit of an abstract idea.  Sort of like the idea of actually serving a church week in and week out was to me in seminary.
Conventional wisdom says that it's a good idea to set small achievable goals en route to your larger goals, so you don't get discouraged and give up.  Thus many of us, tend to break our lives up into a series of goals: the simplest of which is the common sigh of relief breathed by so many on Friday, but which also includes waiting to have children or buy a house, which includes a good deal of obsessive and sometimes destructive behavior in pursuit of a a promotion or just more money.
Goals are not a bad thing, but the utilitarian ethics that sometimes arise from single-minded focus on goals, can blind us to some obvious dangers at the very least.  In more dire scenarios the idea that the end justifies the means leads people who claim to follow Christ to tacitly accept war mongering and economic tyranny, because of "the way the world works."
We set little goals for ourselves with the hope that if we string these little milestones together, we will eventually get to where we're going.  The problem is that you can spend so much time looking for the next milestone that you don't appreciate the journey.  Living into the incarnation is about appreciating the journey.
Sure there are times to set your face towards something and just resolve to push towards it, but don't let that be your whole life.  In the case of my morning walk, while I do it for health goals and even as I'm working towards a big goal, I am trying to stay present to the beauty of the lake as the seasons change, to the variety that still exists in a familiar route, to the various thoughts and prayers that come along the way.  I know that my mind and soul need preparation for the Camino as much as my body, but where the physical preparation involves setting goals and hardening muscles, the soul work involves letting go of a mind that grows impatient with the ground beneath my feet, and being perpetually vulnerable enough to live in the now.