Daily Success August 20 does not really apply. While my wife and I arrived home last Wednesday, August 16th, and the jetlag seems to be past enough for me to get back in the process of doing my Daily Success posts, my Camino success processes are far from back in place. That will come, but not quite yet.

I arrived home with a huge backlog of content from ’21, ’22, and ’23 to review, edit, and post here and on YouTube. Dealing with all that will not take hours or days or weeks. It will take months or years and I’m looking forward to doing it with real pleasure as it will allow me to revisit the physical side of a spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical Journey that I cannot really explain. I do know, however, that the physical part is the smallest part.

And yet …

Reaching Santiago on August 1st and receiving my Compostela on August 2nd were the symbolic end to this part of my Journey. That end, which people congratulate me for achieving, has been and remains difficult. For some time, I’ve enjoyed focusing my life around the Camino; planning for it, preparing my body for it, hiking it, talking and writing about it. Seeing that end, if only symbolically and only for a single part of the Journey, is strange and uncomfortable.

Then, when I both hesitantly and proudly handed my credentials with all their sellos to the lady behind the counter at the Pilgrim’s Office, she stamped them in a sort of cancellation on the part where my name and starting locations appeared rather than in the next blank on the second of them as I had, somehow, expected. It was almost a physical blow.

What next?

Professional commitments make the next year or three impractical for the kind of Camino efforts that the last couple years have included. My credentials are closed out. My body (left knee and herniated disk) and the nice lady doctor who helped so much with my pain when I needed it have expressed real doubts about carrying a backpack for ten miles or so a day for days on end. Perhaps it’s time to take the training to become a hospitalero. Or use Camino con Correos. Or go with more aggressive treatments rather than pain management.

Or something else.

But I do know one thing: el Camino de Santiago has been a fabulous experience over six years (two of which were “standby mode”) and a number of days actually hiking that I have not counted or even tried to count. Its value has so far exceeded the costs in pain, in planning, in exercise, in money, in time that I would not trade a second of the overall experience for something else.

Well, two things: if this is something that you want to do, DO IT! If I can do it, YOU can do it. And begin the planning and preparing for your own Camino Journey now.

If not now, when?