Setting My Own Pace

I’ve just returned from two weeks of wide sky, expansive ocean, and open time. My college friend, Saralyn, and I, walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain. The Camino is a pilgrimage walk that has particular fame on this campus thanks to the much-beloved Professor Greenia who accompanies students there each year. For my friend and me, the walk was not for credit, but was certainly a way to learn, and to mark this point in our lives as important and sacred, walking with gratitude into the next chapter. Along the way, I found ways to live into one of my intentions for the walk: to set my own pace.

Despite its colonial ties, life at W&M is often life in the fast lane. Google calendars are color-coded works of modern art, and we rush from one meeting to the next class to the next 10 minute (!) coffee date. As a staff member and teacher, my life is also booked, back to back, most days and often well into the evening. So when we were setting our intentions for this pilgrimage, I knew that stepping outside of time would be at the top of my list.

A little primer on the life of a Camino pilgrim: you wake up. You walk for a long time – usually between 10 and 20 miles. You check into a hostel, and you shower, wash your clothes, and rest. Then you do it again. Several days of this add up to at least 70 miles of walking (depending on the route you take), landing you in Santiago de Compostela.

While most pilgrims were getting up to begin their walk by 6 am, my friend and I slept. Then, we had a café con leche or two. We set intentions for the day. We re-stuffed our packs slowly. And we often left town just as the next day’s pilgrims were arriving.

When I wanted to stop and examine that particular spider web and how the mist made it glisten, I did. When the sheep from the farm I passed began to call my name in their quirky baaa language, I said hello. When a sumptuous picnic lunch settled in my body and I wanted to take a nap in that soft field over there, I set my pack down and rested. I set my own pace, and it was good.

And in that process – along with the kind and thoughtful (and hilarious) time with my friend and the strangers I met, under the shelter of eucalyptus and to the rustle of so many corn fields, alongside the edge of a hill that hugged the shoreline of the Atlantic, and to the songs of birds and cows and raindrops – time opened up. It became as endless as the path before me, and as generous as the hearts of those who opened their homes, tables, and hearts to me along the way.

This morning, six days after returning home, I heard an interview with John O’Donohue on the On Being podcast. In it, the Irish poet and philosopher commented that “stress is a perverted relationship to time. So that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven’t had a true moment for yourself. And to relax in and to just be…. And I think when you slow it down, then you find your rhythm, and when you come into rhythm, then you come into a different kind of time.” Later on, he refers to time as the “mother of presence.”

Indeed.

So, if you propose that we have a 10 minute coffee date this semester, don’t be surprised if I insist on at least an hour. If we cross paths on the Sunken Garden and you see me bending down to admire the mushrooms that grow there in the morning (they do!), smile at them with me.

Because though our brother O’Donohue died over seven years ago, it seemed as I listened to him that he had, in fact, been overhearing me these past two weeks. And if he were, he was hearing me discover how the steps of the Camino – each one – birthed a new experience of presence. As I tuned into the whispers of being. As I trusted my pace.