Walking in Circles

I mentioned to a Camino friend the other day that I was going out for a walk. He said that it must be harder to be motivated to walk when you were going to end up in the same place that you started. That got me thinking about one of the differences between walking on the Camino and at home. On the Camino our daily walk always resulted in traversing new land and villages and scenery and finishing in a new place. It was always moving forward, slowly approaching an ultimate goal of arriving in Santiago. We didn't retrace steps or return to where we had been. We knew that if we wanted a photo of something that we had to stop and take it, we wouldn't have a second chance. We had to take time in the present moment for whatever we were experiencing, no second chances. There was a communal experience of all of us heading in the same direction, albeit at different speeds and stopping points.  We were all on the "Yellow Brick Road ", or more accurately the yellow arrow/shell camino. This was one of the primary elements that bonded us together.

At home, we are all going a million miles an hour in different directions. Our lives intersect with others, but often only briefly before we go separate ways. It was a very unifying thing to all be headed in the same direction with the same goal. 

Although at home I do essentially walk in a circle, returning to my starting point,  I actually don't find it harder to be motivated to take a walk around my beloved Emeryville Marina than to get up and walk on the Camino. It is a different experience to daily walk the same path, past the same landscape and returning to the place that I started than what I felt on the Camino. But I do love the familiar and I'm never bored or unmoved by its beauty. Of course, the bay trail that I frequent runs along the bay with views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, the Marin Headlands, the Berkeley hills and San Francisco. What's not to love! I find comfort and peace and joy in this familiar path. I notice the nuances of the clouds in the sky, the patterns of the tides, the migration of the birds and the changing leaves on the trees. I love greeting the regulars out walking and those that I haven't yet met. There is less sense of adventure than on the Camino, but a deep resonance with a feeling of being home.