The Camino Doesn't Tell You What Comes Next

Sometimes the most important part of the Camino begins after we stop walking.

Recently, The Wall Street Journal published an article by Shannon Carroll with a headline that immediately caught my attention: “I Walked 500 Miles on the Camino de Santiago to Find What Comes Next.” Carroll had lost her job amid AI-era cuts, and much of the structure that had organized her life was suddenly disappearing.

So she did something people have been doing for more than a thousand years: she started walking. She chose the Camino Francés, beginning in the Pyrenees and walking roughly 800 kilometers across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.

What struck me most about her story wasn't the distance, the blisters, the rain, the communal albergues, or even the four nuns who joined a room full of pilgrims in singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” It was the question she carried with her: What comes next?

I know that question well. For most of my adult life, I knew where I was going. I spent more than thirty years building a career in the music and entertainment business. There was always another company to build, another project, another problem to solve, another goal somewhere out in front of me.

Then there wasn't. And like a lot of people who reach a major transition in life, my first instinct was to figure out the next thing. What's the next job? What's the next project? What's the next version of the life I already know how to live?

Eventually, I found myself walking the Camino too. I wish I could tell you that somewhere between Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and Santiago a yellow arrow pointed toward my new life, but it didn't. There was no new career plan waiting in front of the Cathedral.

What the Camino gave me was something I needed much more. It gave me the space to begin stripping away who I thought I was.

The Camino Creates Space

We spend decades accumulating identities. Executive. Parent. Spouse. Provider. Successful person. The one who has the answers. The one people depend on. Eventually those identities can become so intertwined with who we are that we have difficulty imagining ourselves without them.

For me, the Camino began stripping some of that away. Out there, very little of what had defined me back home mattered. Nobody cared about my résumé. Nobody needed to know what companies I had run or what I had accomplished. I was another pilgrim carrying a backpack and trying to get to the next town.

Life became remarkably simple. Wake up, put on your shoes and walk. Eat when you're hungry, talk to whoever happens to be beside you, find somewhere to sleep, and get up tomorrow and do it again.

Day after day, kilometer after kilometer, there was less noise. As some of those old identities began to loosen, there was finally room for something else to surface.

That distinction has become important to me. I don't think I found a new identity on the Camino. I created enough space for parts of myself that had been buried beneath the old one to begin emerging.

Our Instinct Is to Double Down

When an important part of our identity begins disappearing, the natural response is often to grab onto it even harder. We try to recreate the career, recover the status, replace the relationship or build another version of whatever previously told us who we were.

I did some of that too. It's understandable because the space between an old identity and whatever comes next can be deeply uncomfortable. We have spent our lives learning how to build, achieve, solve and control. When something stops working, every instinct tells us to work harder at it.

But sometimes the thing we're trying to save is exactly the thing we're being asked to release.

The Camino gave me a different way of responding. Walking itself became a ritual of letting go. Every morning I packed what little I had, left where I'd been and walked toward somewhere I had never seen. Every day required leaving something behind.

There were other rituals too—stones carried and eventually put down, prayers and intentions, conversations with strangers, moments of silence, arriving and departing. Some were ancient Camino traditions. Others became rituals of my own.

I write about many of them in Under a Canopy of Grapes because, looking back, I understand that they were doing something I couldn't fully see at the time. They were teaching me how to let go without immediately replacing what I had released.

Being Open to What Surfaces

This is where asking What comes next? can become complicated. It's an important question, but if we become obsessed with answering it, we can simply turn the future into another project to manage. We start searching for the next job, the next relationship, the next purpose, the next identity. Before we've really released the old life, we're already constructing its replacement.

The question itself can keep us looking so far ahead that we aren't paying attention to what is trying to surface now. The Camino taught me another possibility: strip away, let go, create space and pay attention.

That doesn't mean becoming passive. It means being open. It means resisting the urge to fill every empty space simply because emptiness makes us uncomfortable. It means trusting that we don't have to manufacture every answer.

The Camino is extraordinarily good at teaching this because you can plan the route, but you cannot plan what the road will bring you. You cannot schedule the stranger who will sit beside you at dinner, the conversation that will stay with you for years, the landscape that will unexpectedly bring you to tears or the difficult morning that will reveal something you weren't looking for.

You can prepare yourself for the journey. You can keep walking. But you also have to become present enough to receive what the road gives you.

Santiago Isn't the End

Eventually every Camino reaches Santiago. You stand in front of the Cathedral, take the photograph, hug the people you've walked with and perhaps attend the Pilgrim's Mass. Then, sooner or later, you go home.

That's when something interesting happens. The Camino ends, but the process doesn't. The identities you loosened are waiting for you. So are the routines, expectations and relationships you left behind. The world has not reorganized itself simply because you walked across Spain.

And now comes the harder question: What do I do with the space I've created?

There is an old word associated with the Camino: Ultreia—an encouragement among pilgrims to keep going, to move onward and beyond. I've come to understand that differently since returning home. Santiago may mark the end of the physical pilgrimage, but there is still an onward and a beyond.

The harder pilgrimage may be learning how to live once the yellow arrows disappear. That journey followed me home, and over time, I came to think of what followed as the Second Camino.

The first Camino is the walk across Spain. The Second Camino is what happens when we return home and try to live what we discovered along the way.

There are no yellow arrows on the Second Camino. There isn't a guidebook telling us where to stop each night, and there isn't a Cathedral waiting at the end to tell us we've arrived.

The temptation is to fill the space again—to return to what we know, rebuild what we've lost and double down on the identities that once made us feel secure. The harder work is remaining open long enough for something else to emerge.

What Comes Next May Already Be Surfacing

Carroll's article stayed with me because the question in its title is one so many of us carry onto the Camino and through other major transitions in our lives: What comes next? Her story describes a Camino filled with people walking for many of the reasons that bring us to these crossroads—burnout, career uncertainty, grief, retirement, faith and the desire to discover something different.

I recognize that experience. The Camino didn't tell me what came next either. Instead, it helped me release enough of what had come before that something new finally had room to emerge.

Perhaps that's a different way of thinking about transition, especially in the second half of life. Maybe we don't always need to figure out what comes next. Maybe we need to create the space for it.

To strip away some of the identities we've accumulated. To let go of what has finished. To resist doubling down on a past that no longer fits. To become present enough to notice what begins surfacing when we finally stop trying to force the answer.

That's what the Camino did for me. It didn't show me the future. It made room for it.

And I've come to believe that's where the Second Camino begins.

Shannon Carroll's “I Walked 500 Miles on the Camino de Santiago to Find What Comes Next” was published by The Wall Street Journal on August 25, 2026.

Read Shannon Carroll's original article: The Wall Street Journal