The long journey

Last year my husband and I walked one of Europe’s pilgrimages. It was 900km or 560 miles. This involved 40 walking days plus rest days.

Now, since the age of 18 I have attempted three of the 5 day walks in our own country and I have only completed one of them. I also suffered chronic pain for much of the last twenty years.

To attempt a 900km walk with my history may have been crazy. To start it with no preparation would definitely have been so.

You might be reading my posts and the idea of becoming unoffendable is so outside of your comfort zone, beyond your experience and seems so ‘out there’ based on your history that you almost want to dismiss the idea as impossible.

The word that has been swirling in my mind for the last week is perseverance. Let’s take a look at a few ways that we can make progress even when it seems unlikely. Start small, take time to recover and notice your progress.

First of all, start small. If I do a big workout, the tight muscles afterwards pull and worsen my pain. However, if I do a light workout, my body copes okay. With this knowledge in mind, I began practising for the walk with manageable distances and slowly increased them until I could do one decent length walk. After that, I began practising doing long walks for several days in a row so that I would be prepared for the day in day out rhythm of a pilgrimage.

For you, it might, for example, be a massive hurdle to suggest that you allow others to do something without correcting them or to suggest that you forgive someone.

What you CAN do is to notice your own reaction if you see someone doing something and you want to correct them. Notice and then get curious about it. Why do I feel that must be done a certain way? Is it actually because of legal obligations or safety issues or could someone achieve the same thing with a different process? What would happen if I let them do it differently? Is it actually my place to give an opinion on this matter?

Notice how you respond when someone hurts you. Notice and then get curious about it. Why does that hurt? Is it just throwing me back to a previous hurt or is this actually something that is not okay today? Is there a pattern here? How could I go about things differently? Is there a boundary that I need to put in place? 

Perhaps you could keep quiet one time and see what the result is. Perhaps you could speak up one time and let others know that you need some space to process what just happened. Just try something small.

As we prepared for our walk, I planned for rest days. I had read about the walk and someone had commented that if they did it again they would take more rest days near the beginning. I took that on board and paced myself.

Now, if you’re at the gym and you do one set of a particular exercise, you might pause for a minute and then do it again. For you, perhaps it’s keeping quiet again. Maybe it’s speaking up again. Maybe it’s talking yourself through something again. Maybe it’s letting it go again.

After a gym session, we expect to feel something afterwards.  So if you’ve tried something and then required some recovery time, allow yourself space. When muscles repair after exercise they are usually building back stronger. That uncomfortable stage is a necessary part of growth.

If you have a pattern of harsh self talk, be really kind to yourself here. Your natural tendency to tell yourself off or to go over all the ways that you could have done better is not helpful, so practise pushing back on that negative self talk. Recovery time is normal and natural.

When you’ve rested, practise again. Hopefully as you continue to exercise curiosity and respond differently you may find a way that works for you. You’ll find over time that your endurance builds. You can handle more of a challenge.

When we were walking I built up endurance. At one stage we cancelled a rest day or two as I had established how far I could reasonably walk in a day and I knew that I could walk that distance day in and day out.

Later on, we had booked accommodation and although I knew that I could walk further, we had to practice the discipline of being okay with a small distance and resting when we preferred to keep going. For two people who are used to achieving, this was a challenge all on its own.

I had a response on Facebook this week about sitting in emotion whether it is positive or negative. I thought that was brilliant. Learning to just be, whatever is going on is a skill in itself. You could argue that walking day in and day out was a challenge, but allowing ourselves to just be was sometimes just as hard. If you’ve been challenged with emotions, maybe a small step that you can do is allow yourself to feel the emotion without trying to escape it. Take small steps. Your capacity to cope with it will grow as you practise.

The advantage of a pilgrimage is that there are markers every now and then documenting your progress. But in life we don’t often get clear markers of our progress or growth.

One way that we can notice our progress is to write down our thoughts and look back over our notes occasionally to see how we have grown.

I remember when an issue came up at one stage and I lamented about it in prayer. I had the thought  pop into my head that although I was dealing with the same issue again, I was able to recognise it and work through it much faster than I used to. I was making progress even though the issue kept coming up. Of course I would prefer that the issue disappeared. But instead it was exercising my emotional muscles and challenging me to grow.

The crazy thing about a pilgrimage is that when you think that you have reached the end, you are really only halfway. Back in the middle ages when there were no cars, planes or trains, pilgrims had to turn around and walk home again. Nowadays when we walk a pilgrimage we have to take our learnings back to normal life and figure out how to apply them.

If you realise something about the way that you tick on your journey, you then have the privilege to try and figure out how to apply it. Be kind to yourself, we are rarely instantly skillful when trying something new.

You have no control over how others will respond to your changes, so tread lightly and make a start. As you take step after step, you will make progress even if it seems small at first. Over time, you will cover more ground until you can stop and marvel at how far you’ve come.

We can make progress even when it seems unlikely. Start small, take time for rest and recovery and notice your progress. Perhaps even celebrate it.

Some people can just turn up for a pilgrimage and wing it. They might get a few aches and pains as they get underway, but they have the underlying ability to persevere, to make progress. Others of us have to train and start small just to be able to get to the start line. The perseverance in these seemingly tiny things lays the foundation for things to come.

On a pilgrimage it is really easy to think that everyone should be approaching it the same way as you. One of the things that I learnt along the way is that everyone has their own journey and depending on a whole lot of factors like the time that they have available, their health, their resources and who they come across on their journey; everyone’s experience will be different. Some people catch a bus from time to time, some cycle, some walk, some carry bags, some send their bags ahead, some talk as they walk, others have headphones on, some tent, some pray… the differences go on. Your journey is personal to you. Take it at the pace and in the way that you need to. Whatever the path that you are on, persevere. Keep taking steps in the right direction and you will make progress.