I recently gave a talk to a local group about walking the Camino de Santiago - the ancient pilgrim route, 550 miles across Northern Spain.
"Wonderfully inspiring!", "Made me want to get out there!", "I feel like I've done the walk myself."...
Sharing an adventure makes it all the more worthwhile - tales of struggle that give others a boost in their own lives to go for their own challenges, large or small, along ther own paths...
Addressing questions like "How did you keep going when things got tough?"
Answered by "For me it's having a big enough reason for doing it... and so wanting to do it enough..." (eg raising money for charity, or for world peace... or the Camino was actually a training for walking to the North Pole!)
And people frequently ask me "What was the toughest thing and what was the best?"
I answer the same for both... "Facing of self. that's the hardest and also the best." It brings you to that point of seeing what you're learning, seeing how you're growing and giving meaning to life.
In the case of the Camino it was tackling walking 20 miles a day, living the pilgrim life, carrying a heavy rucksack, non stop for 28 days, not knowing where we would sleep and with acutely painful blisters.
But we got to meet other pilgrims
and knights templars
walk the Earth
see doggies who'd walked 1500 miles
