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These are tomorrow´s mountains
And you can just about see the road I have to walk up as well Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body I dunno (Still Ill, The Smiths)
Actually, I´m in Villafrana del Bierzo, but what´s 25 Kms between friends...
So this morning I just wasn´t feeling it. The route out of Ponferrada was not well waymarked, my guidebook was no use, I´d had a crappy night´s sleep (BTW, what is the aversion that the Spanish have for fresh air. They look up a room tighter than an anally retentive buttcrack, consequently raising the room temperature to about 1,000 degrees and ensuring that oxygen deprivation in the middle of the night becomes a real possibility), and I was just changing into my cranky pants.
This made me even worse, because I hadn´t felt like this for a couple of weeks - in fact I´d been feeling quite the opposite. I began to wonder if I´d been kidding myself that I´d been feeling better - that it was just the novelty of being somewhere different and now that that was wearing off I was back to where I was. I was just starting to get a bit low, when I decided to stop at a bar for a coffee. This was the first that I´d found open today (Sundays in Spain are like 1950´s Melbourne - very little moves at all).
Within about 100 yards of leaving the cafe, everything became clear - I wasn´t feeling depressed. I just needed a
cafe solo (and a croissant). All of a sudden the day looked lovely, the mountains in the distance looked inviting and I had a spring in my step. I made peace with the snoring Spaniards in my room last night - gosh they were only kids. I just had a physical need that required satisfying and I was good to go!
This got me to reflecting on a conversation that I´d had with an American guy some days ago - a conversation which caused a bit of eye rolling for those listening in. We were discussing the ideas of Abraham Maslow (look him up on Wikipedia if this means nothing to you) and his hierarchy of needs. We imagined that on the camino, the hierarchy was a bit different from in ´the real world´. At the bottom of the scale your physiological needs become paramount - food, shelter and where to excrete can occupy huge swathes of your day, as does the safety aspect. The next rungs - what we called belonging and status, we felt were reduced on the camino - your ´belonging-ness´ was covered by ´I am a pilgrim´. Some people tried to establish heirarchies of pilgrimages and pilgrims - you are only a real pilgrim if you walk from (insert absurdly far away point to start pilgrimage here) and if you walk it barefooted carrying a horse, kinda sums these few people up. But generally these types are few and far between and are avoided easily.
Marcus and I then decided (we were agreeing furiously at this point) that the upshot of this distortion of Maslow´s heirarchy while on the camino, was that it lead to greater space for the final piece of the pyramid - ´self-actualisation´. This is why the camino provides the space for an individual to ´work things out´while walking. At this point we were called ´wankers´by the rest of the table, so we ordered another rioja and moved on...
But one last thing... One of the earliest conversations I had about the camino, was with a guy doing a second walk because he felt he had ´lost´the feeling of the camino back in his ´real life´. Maslow asserts that any moment of self-actualisation is always temporary. In other words, if you think that the camino is going to sort you out forever, in the words of the great philosopher ´Tell him he´s dreamin´´...
Finally, tomorrow I climb up the last big hills for the trip. I want to take the tricky route, so I hope it will all work out. I only include this so that the alliteration in the title of this blog makes sense.
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