Paulo Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage. Shirley MacLaine wrote The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit. Emilio Estevez created the film The Way. These stories, and many more, share the experience of walking the Camino de Santiago.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have the time and money to travel to Europe and undertake this 500-mile journey to enlightenment? Experiencing this hardship has become legendary among those privileged few who find a way to leave their comfortable lives and subject themselves to this journey. Have you ever wished you could be one of them?
Yeah, that would be great. Leave your obligations and daily life behind tp experience the challenge of walking 500 miles through Europe.
I’m not knocking it. I know it is very difficult and it is a truly great experience but this is my message for the rest of us. We aren’t traveling to Europe and leaving it all behind. We are standing in the middle of it, experiencing the hardship of traveling through the pilgrimage that is our everyday lives – family, relationships, financial necessities that must be addressed. For most of us everyday life is our Camino and it can be even more powerful than the European trek, because there is no turning away or turning back. There will probably be no book deals or film contracts at the end. It is simply the life we must live without glory or romance. It is pure reality.
There are people who hold gold in their hands. The material world is theirs to command but we are the alchemists. We hold the base metals in our hands, the base metals of our everyday lives, but we have the power. We can convert those base metals into the gold of transformation, a gold far richer than anything that can be purchased with money.
We are the gold. Our lives are the Camino. Carry yourself with pride in who and what you are, an ordinary person who can create an extraordinary reality with nothing but the miracle of humanity that is carried within you, no matter what your surface reality appears to be.
“No heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.” – Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist