Clarity of Purpose

There were days, somewhere in the bulging middle of the Camino, where I was just at peace with - well - everything: up hill, down hill, wind, rain, sun, bad beds, pilgrim food, sore feet, tired legs.  It was an interesting, and all too fleeting time.  At the beginning it was all too new, at the end I just wanted to be done, but for a while, it just was what I was doing and I was able to just sort of rest in a very zen like sort of detachment as I walked.  I kept my own pace, and I was alone a lot of the time.  I would mostly keep Dad in sight, and periodically we would stop for a rest and a snack, but when we walked he preferred to move just a little faster, so we were usually about 50 meters apart.
But pace was important, when I tried to go faster than my pace, my feet started to ache more and there was this feeling that I was going to turn an ankle or pull a muscle, so I settled in, I thought about intentionally taking long strides and keeping my knees bent, especially on the descents.  I was slow on the uphills because, well they went up hill and I was slow on the downs because I was cautious and really didn't feel like tasting those rocky slopes with my face.  At some point I came to grips with the fact that I was the tortoise not the hare, and I think that fact kept me safe and healthy on the whole adventure: no blisters, no sprains, no injuries to speak of, slow and steady, one foot in front of the other.
All I had to do was walk.  And we did, day in and day out, without really taking a day off.  Maybe we should have taken a day here or there, but it felt too much like we would lose momentum.  As long as we had that clear purpose almost anything seemed bearable: get up, pack, walk, shower, rest, eat, sleep, repeat.  On such an amazing adventure, routine was still absolutely necessary.  There was a lot about the Camino that required flexibility and spontaneity and would push us out of the comfort zone, and in order to deal with those there needs to be a framework.
It doesn't have to be a rigid framework, but it does need to give you a general outline for what you do.  It occurred to me during this time that this was perhaps the real wisdom of the system of sabbath keeping that was so crucial to the identity of Israel.  If  you know that the seventh day is a day of rest, just as we knew the late afternoons were going to be on the Camino, you can deal with just about anything.  My nugget of wisdom from the Dutch Hospitalero in Villamayor: "Sooner or later, it will be evening."
Disciplines should give you that sense of boundary and framing.  The Camino does it daily, I think the biblical plan of sabbath (and the extended practice of jubilee) stretch that frame out a little.  If you know there's a limit to things, you deal better with what is.  This is counter-cultural in an age of rapid change and deeply camouflaged principalities and powers.  Often we don't even know what we're resting from, what cycle we're breaking or what boundary we are setting.
Sometimes the reflex is to neglect boundaries altogether.  Dad asked me towards the end if maybe we would have been better served to take days off.  We had built some sabbath time into the schedule and really the only thing we accomplished by pushing on was more downtime in Madrid before our flight home, so maybe we should have.  I'm still not really sure about the idea though, because I felt like every day was so finely balanced between work and rest, between routine and creative and intuitive problem solving, that I'm not sure we really needed to just sit still.  I understand though that this type of thinking would be dangerous in a longer term, but on the Camino any time I really considered sitting still for a day, it seemed like I would be falling into the opposite pit: creating false boundaries.
This is the hallmark of extreme conservatism, fundamentalism and reactive thinking: let's fight the barbarians at the gate, let's throw up our defenses with all sorts of rules and regulations, let's define the framework in the strongest possible terms.  Jesus' repeated conflicts with the Pharisees over sabbath keeping demonstrate how this works.  Their rules for keeping sabbath had become rigid to the point of being absurd.  Jesus never denigrates the idea of sabbath or says it's a bad idea, he basically just says, "be sensible about it people, it's there for your own good after all."
I think in the end, the pilgrimage as a whole was such a sabbath experience, away from everything that normally occupies my life, that it seemed silly to take a sabbath from a sabbath.  The experience of sitting still at the end of everything was nice for about a day or so, but then it started to become the norm again.
We met a fair number of people who were sort of fundamentalist about the Camino "rules," who looked down on private rooms or hotels as a betrayal, who sort of scoffed at people who used the baggage service or buses (I may have fallen into that pit a time or two).  There were people who felt that they had to make a certain number of kilometers per day, or had to get here or there by a certain time (also guilty of that occasionally).  At least for me though, this was self correcting on the Camino, it would humble you.  I wonder if life doesn't do that as well.
Maybe sometimes you don't really know the true importance of something until you walk away from it.