Day six - About excess baggage

Words of wisdom - not only on Women's day!

I discovered today that it is going to take me over a million steps to reach Santiago and reading these words made me wonder what I am going to find when I ultimately reach my destination.

I hope it's going to be joy. Isn't that really one of the most important things we search for all our lives?

What I probably really should strive for is to find joy every step along the way and not hope for it to lie waiting for me at step number one million and one.

Living in the now - experiencing life at its fullest right here and now, every day of our lives. Why is it so difficult?  Somehow the past always seems to try and hitch a ride and invariably casts unwanted shadows on the now.

As far as I'm concerned, I've had it with excess baggage! I'm allowed one backpack for one moth of walking the Camino. I have a suspicion that that in itself is going to be a liberation of sorts. Surely we can do life without all the extra luggage as well!

So here goes to living in the now and with only the things I need to experience joy. Nothing more.

The miners in Chile were finally reunited with their families today. Their two month ordeal certainly was a pilgrimage of sorts as well.

I would love to know how lives have been changed after this incredible experience. Relationships can't possibly be the same again. Mindsets can't be the same ever again. Lets hope that only good and lasting changes will take place in the lives of these people.

It must be special to have a second chance with someone when you came so close to losing them. There certainly was enough time to think about all the things that should be said.

Living in the now. Embrace it!

Lets end (or start!) with some of The Beatitudes of the pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago:

'Blessed are you pilgrim, if your backpack empties of things as your heart doesn't know where to fit so many emotions,

Blessed are you pilgrim, if you discover that a step backwards to help another is more valuable than one hundred forward without awareness of those at your sides.

Blessed are you pilgrim, if you search the truth and make of your camino a life and of your life a camino, after Him who is the Way, the Life, and the Truth.'

Amen, I say.