In northwestern Spain lies the Camino de Santiago,
a pilgrimage route leading to the great Cathedral of Santiago.
People from all over the world gather here,
whether or not they have faith,
and keep walking, each carrying their own reasons.
Many seek religious meaning.
Others, standing at a turning point in life, hope to find something new.
The reasons are as many as the people themselves,
but what everyone does is the same, Walk.
That was all.
I also set foot on this path.
But on the night before my first step,
I lay curled up in a sleeping bag at a cheap hostel in Portugal, unable to sleep.
“Can I really walk more than 300 kilometers?”
That question clung to my chest,
and even with my eyes closed,
unease kept rising slowly from deep inside my body.
The next morning, I shouldered my pack and took my first step.
Out of the town, across the fields, following the yellow arrows,
I thought, “Maybe this won’t be as hard as I feared.”
But that confidence quickly broke down within a few days.
The pain in my back, the blisters on my feet, the relentless sun overhead.
Just thinking, “And this goes on every single day?”
was enough to crush my spirit.
A Quiet Allow
The hours of walking alone were not just silence.
On long stretches of road where I spoke to no one,
I realized I had started muttering to myself.
At first, it was only to distract myself.
But little by little, it turned into words of encouragement:
“Just a bit more.” “You’ll be fine.”
It felt as if a new friend had been born inside me,
and I walked on, supported by that voice.
Solitude was no longer something to endure,
but a time to befriend myself.
And the more I walked,
the more memories surfaced that I would never recall in daily life.
Casual conversations with my family,
moments of laughter with friends,
the dining table at a friend’s home in England where I once stayed.
Fragments too ordinary to notice before
were uncovered one by one as I kept walking.
They felt less like nostalgia,
and more like “support” being summoned from within me.
Each of those scenes made me want to whisper “thank you.”
And when the words actually left my mouth,
something inside my chest loosened.
Happiness wasn’t waiting at some distant goal.
It was already here,
in the very moment when gratitude welled up naturally.
To feel grateful is proof that you are already full.
When people feel only lack, they forget gratitude.
But when “thank you” rises freely from the heart,
it means you have noticed what you already have.
And in that moment,
you are already inside happiness.
The Way to Ponte de Lima
The journey was, after all, harsh.
Even after passing through small villages,
there were no shops,
and some days I had to keep walking to the next town hungry.
When hunger struck, my mind thought only of food.
But sitting down on the roadside didn’t change anything.
“There’s no choice. I just have to accept it.”
That was all I could tell myself.
The struggle was not so much with hunger itself,
but with how to convince myself to keep going.
There were times when heavy rain drenched me,
and my body grew so cold that my legs finally stopped.
At that moment, an old man from a house along the road called out to me.
She let me stand under his roof and shared some water.
It was such a small act,
yet my chest suddenly relaxed.
“To be saved this much by the kindness of a stranger”
The thought loosened the tension in me,
and tears nearly came.
Sometimes, cars passing by would honk just to cheer me on,
the drivers waving their hands.
Just a few seconds of signal.
But simply knowing that someone had seen me
was enough to push me forward.
In solitude, it was these small moments
that kept me walking again and again.
Hunger, solitude, the chill of rain, and the kindness of others,
none of them were just events.
Each asked me the same question:
“How will you take this in?”
The same experience could mean something completely different
depending on how I received it.
Some truths could only be seen in hardship,
others only through kindness.
In the end, it was my own state of mind
that gave everything its meaning.
As I kept walking, I began to wish I could be like a baby.
Crying when I wanted to cry,
laughing when I was happy,
sleeping when I was tired.
Just accepting the world in front of me as it was.
The older we grow,
the more comparisons and reasoning come first,
and it becomes harder to take things in simply.
But with every step I took,
I felt those layers being stripped away.
My heart grew lighter not because I gained something,
but because I had let go of what I didn’t need.
The sunsets along the road,
a passing smile,
the ordinary moments,
none of them were extraordinary, yet the closer my heart came to being empty,
the fresher they appeared.
“Maybe this is what it means to live,”
I thought, as scenes and moments struck straight into my heart.
– Camino Portugués –
Camino Portuguese
The Camino never went the way I expected.
Plans collapsed, predictions failed.
But that uncertainty was the very nature of the road.
It wasn’t about controlling events,
but about adjusting the way I received them.
That alone kept me moving forward.
Looking back, this road was not only a journey,
but also a pilgrimage of the heart.
The more than 300 kilometers were not only a path through landscapes,
but also a path that dug deeper into my inner self.
Through solitude I became friends with myself,
through hardship I discovered gratitude,
and by letting go of what I didn’t need, my heart grew lighter.
The answer I reached in the end was surprisingly simple.
Happiness exists in the very moment “thank you” slips out.
When gratitude overflows, a person is already fulfilled.
Carrying that realization,
I walked the road from beginning to end,
and all along, I had been within happiness itself.