All That You Can't Leave Behind (But Do Anyway)

Of the physical items that I brought on the Camino, there was one that almost got left at home, a red fleece sweatshirt.  I'm so rarely cold and it was spring after all, and I had a jacket and a rain coat and multiple layers available.  Then I sort of picked up the fleece thing, which I had bought because of its light weight, and I said to myself, "Gee, this weighs next to nothing, I'm gonna take it."  As it turns out, I wore the thing almost every day, not while walking, I rarely needed more warmth when I was walking, but in the evenings, when things got cool and my body was exhausted and I just wanted something warm and soft to wear.  Could I have left it and survived? Sure, but it made my existence so much more pleasant that it was worth bringing.
The hardest things to live without on the Camino, simply could not come with me.  Of all the little choices I made in gear and of all the necessary, unnecessary, and sort of nice to have things that I brought, the heaviest weight to carry was the absence from my family.  This being 2015, we pretty much got to "talk" to each other every day, through Facebook Messenger mostly because the internet in Spain is apparently a little thin on bandwidth, but occasionally we got a good enough connection to actually talk.  And the talking usually made me feel worse, it was like a little taste of something that you crave really badly, or being able to sort of scratch an itch, it made me more aware of how much I missed them, and forced me to think about how much they were missing me.  As the husband/Dad, I'm not sure which one of those is worse.
It's a peculiar thing about loving people very deeply, when you know they're suffering, you would rather take the pain yourself, so that they don't have to.  When Jack was four and he had a bad asthma attack, we took him to the ER and as I held his hand while they put an IV in, it was the only time in my entire life that I actually wished they were jabbing me with the needle.
Yesterday, I talked about the physical struggle of the Camino, but that was nothing compared to the feeling of knowing that you're not going to see the people you love the most for a very long time.  I have always had great respect for folks in the military who regularly spend even longer periods of time away from their loved ones, but now the idea of six months or a year away simply breaks my heart.
But you have to do what you have to do.  You stay in touch, you hear, you read, you try to ease the separation, and you know it's temporary.  That's the only thing that keeps it from being full fledged grief, you know you're going to be home eventually.
In the early part of the walk we stayed at an Albergue run by a Dutch Christian association.  The hospitalero at the Albergue was a volunteer, from a church in Holland, he had never walked the Camino himself and asked us why we were doing it.  At this point, about a week or so into the walk, some of us really didn't have good answers.  The Albergue was in a place called Villamayor, on top of a fairly good sized hill, and the Albergue itself was at the top of a steep slope.  He said he watched people climb that last bit of the hill every day and they often seemed like they were suffering.  I told him that suffering was definitely a part of it, but that you just had to get through it, physical, emotional, or spiritual.
He still wondered why we would do such a thing, and I couldn't really give him very much of an answer.  I told him it was hard, but that it was usually worth it, and the evenings where you could sit and talk to folks and have some beer, sort of made it all better.  He said that he used to work in television and whenever he and his crew would have a hard day trying to film something, they would tell each other, "Sooner or later, it will be evening."  That became sort of a touchstone for me, when things got physically difficult, however, whenever I started to miss my family, which happened fairly often, I just had to tell myself, "Sooner or later it will be May 20."
And now it is.