Should I Walk the Camino de Santiago?
People ask me all the time whether they should walk the Camino de Santiago, and I have noticed that the question tends to surface most urgently in those moments when a life has come loose from its moorings and the next step refuses to reveal itself. But here is what I have learned about most people who allow themselves even a passing thought of the Camino: the thought rarely survives its own first sentence. I could never do that. The person speaking those words does not see a pilgrim when they look in the mirror. They see distance instead, and effort, and uncertainty. So the idea that might have changed everything about their life stays exactly where it was born, a thought and nothing more, unwalked and unlived.
What the Camino actually asks of you has almost nothing to do with what people imagine it asks. It does not demand perfection, and it certainly does not demand the kind of extraordinary courage that belongs in adventure films and war memoirs. What it demands is far simpler and far more available to an ordinary, frightened, uncertain human being than most people believe. It asks for openness. It asks for willingness. That is the whole of the admission price. I have watched people pay it who arrived at the trailhead in Saint Jean Pied de Port utterly convinced they could not walk the distance in front of them. I have watched people who carried the idea of the Camino around for years like a stone in their pocket before they finally let themselves begin. I have watched people who had no idea whether they were ready, and went anyway, because some part of them understood that readiness was never going to be the point.
I was one of those people, and I want to be honest about the fact that nothing about my own beginning felt clean or romantic or touched by some clear and certain calling. I did not hear a voice. I did not have a vision. I simply did not know what to do next, and that not knowing had a weight to it that I still remember in my body. We had just come through the pandemic, and I had no job waiting for me on the other side of it. I was newly sober, which meant I was relearning how to be a person in the world without the thing I had leaned on for years, and my confidence had been worn down to something so thin that the idea of chasing another title, another role, another version of the life I had already lived, did not even register as a real option. Nothing in front of me pointed anywhere in particular. So I chose the one thing I could find that had a beginning and an end, a path with an actual destination, and that choice, made more out of desperation than wisdom, ended up changing the entire shape of my life.
For a great many people, the Camino does not arrive as an invitation. It arrives in the wake of change, summoned not by careful planning but by disruption, the kind that chooses its own timing and gives no warning before it knocks. Richard Rohr writes in Falling Upward that we almost never walk into the second half of our lives by our own volition. Something has to break us open first, some loss or transition or unplanned shift that we did not see coming and would not have chosen if given the choice. A death arrives and rearranges everything around it. A job ends and takes an identity down with it. A retirement lands and leaves a silence where a schedule used to be. A marriage ends and the house feels unfamiliar even though nothing in it has moved. Or perhaps nothing dramatic happens at all, and you simply wake up one ordinary morning with the quiet, undeniable realization that the life you built with such care no longer fits the person you have become. Whatever form it takes, the question that follows is often the same, and it is a question that will not be talked out of asking itself. What now?
If any of that sounds like the inside of your own chest right now, I would encourage you to sit with the question a while longer rather than rushing past it toward logistics and packing lists, because the real answer was never going to be found in gear or guidebooks or itineraries. It is going to be found somewhere quieter, and I have come to believe there are five honest questions worth asking yourself before you decide whether the Camino belongs in your life. Do you need to dig deeper to understand what comes next for you? Are you feeling lost, and yet still holding on to some flicker of hope that something worthwhile lies ahead of you? Would time away, spent walking through open country with nothing but your own footsteps for company, help you see your life more clearly than you can see it now? Are there questions living inside you that you cannot answer from wherever you happen to be standing today? And underneath all of it, do you need something more than a vacation, something closer to a full and honest reset?
If you find yourself answering yes to even one of those questions, and answering it quietly, almost against your own will, then I do not think the Camino is something you should dismiss so easily. Not because you have finally become ready. There may never be a moment when you feel completely ready. But because you have become open, and openness has always been the requirement that mattered most. You do not walk the Camino de Santiago once every piece of your life has been figured out and arranged into a tidy and defensible plan. You walk it precisely because you are willing to take the first step without any guarantee of where the road will eventually lead you, and I promise you that willingness, however small it feels in this moment, is enough to begin.
Buen Camino.
Michael Rucker Camino Más Allá
If the Camino has been quietly calling you and you'd like to talk about what that might mean, you're always welcome to start with a conversation.
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Related Reading:
Is the Camino Calling You? How to Know It's Time to Walk the Camino de Santiago