"All the way is your way."

[First--Kirsten asked to see more of Mr F's art:
this article has great photos from his similar show in 2022.]

Let's see... this was Marz's 11th day on Camino.
I miss her––she's woven into my life––but I wouldn't wish for her to be doing anything else but walking walking walking across Spain.

I've often said that nothing happened when I walked Camino and that it didn't change me. I've even said that was the point--that nothing changed.
But now, looking back 22 summers later, I wonder if that's true... I wonder if little things that happened didn't, in fact, shape my life–cumulatively, in big ways.

On my Day 8, for instance, I'd written down something a woman told me, something that remained important:
"All the rest of the way is your way."
(I'd expressed a desire to walk alone, like she was doing, and she'd told me I could take time and do that.)

I barely ever did walk alone, but recognizing that it was my choice was liberating.

This has been a huge task in my life:
Getting free of my fear of other people's expectations and judgments.
At sixty-two, I've shed a lot of those fears--NOT totally, but a lot--and sometimes that shows up in ways I barely realize.

The other day, bink showed photos of my Fourth of July Rat Parade she helped with to her friend Dale .
He said, "She really does whatever she wants, doesn't she?"

I was baffled by Dale saying that. Playing with toys isn't exactly revolutionary...
bink explained, "He means that many people--including him--would be afraid to do something like that in public."

And I remembered how I had to get over that fear--about a lot of things, including, when I first started blogging here in 2007, about loving Star Trek!
Maybe the thing that helped me the most was realizing:
OTHER PEOPLE DON'T CARE.
(Mostly.)

This advice in some novel I've otherwise forgotten helped me see that:
When you walk into a party, one character says to another, don't worry about how you appear. Other people aren't thinking about what you're wearing, or if you're embarrassing yourself––
they're worried about how they appear.

Overall, I've found this to be true--people don't care if you embarrass yourself, as long as they don't feel threatened--certainly that applies to playing with toys in public anyway.
(If they do feel threatened though, watch out.)

Sometimes it's more than that, though--sometimes people do care, but not negatively: lots of people will sidle up and confess that they like what I'm doing and that they do it too.

That happens with some big, difficult life things too.
Not that people "like" them, no, but when I've talked about having had an affair, for instance, or that my mother took her own life, I often hear, "Me too". (Or they share other heavy secrets.)

bink and I met an Irish woman, Alice, on Camino, and she was on pilgrimage in part to walk out the pain of ending a long-term affair with a married man. I was still getting free of Oliver (our affair ended with a whimper when I returned), and it was so helpful to talk to Alice about the quite similar situations. (These sort of things often look the same.)

Along with Alice, we walked with a Spanish man, Fidel, and a woman from California, Clare, for about a week until people took off in different directions or at different speeds.
I sketched the trio, below, on Day 10.

Before she left home, Marz had been scared about walking alone.
I reminded her that she has a credit card, she can come home early if it's terrible.
"But give it a couple weeks," I said. "Camino doesn't really start till you've been walking a bunch of days."

There was no online social media in 2001, but ten years later on my second and last Camino, a young woman told me it took her two weeks to stop composing Facebook posts in her mind.
Marz was wise not to take a smartphone (she doesn't even own one).

In 2001, I walked around a bend in the road one day during my second week, saw a plain of poppies ahead of me, and felt my brain unfurl, like a clenched fist relaxing open.

Dear Marz, may clarity and liberation happen for you.
I'm going to assume it already has, or is scheduled to, right around now.