How can this keep happening? It's the height of idiocy to keep repeating things in the same manner but expect different results. We have too much stuff! Our promise to be ruthless in packing has been buried beneath all our stuff.
The zen of walking a pilgrimage is its simplicity; it is an opportunity to live an uncluttered life. Our everyday life is anything but uncluttered. We have embraced the societal norm which dictates that we acquire 'stuff'. We want our life to be easy, fast, comfortable and convenient and so we spend years accumulating stuff to achieve this.
The ridiculous result of amassing all this stuff is that then we have to spend an the inordinate amount of time trying to organize the stuff and then, when it's too much for the space we have available, we have to find a way to store the stuff. So we buy more stuff; shelving, baskets, plastic tubs, garage cabinets, portable storage units. If that isn't enough, there's an entire industry out there which, for a monthly rental fee, will store our stuff or we can resort to the tacky cottage industry of the 'garage sale'. You lay out all of your stuff on the driveway very, very early on a Saturday morning so that others can drive by, look it over and offer you one tenth of what you had priced it at and one hundredth what you paid for it originally. If you are ever lucky enough to get a handle on your own stuff (which I never have accomplished yet), then your children move back home from university with their stuff.
A camino is a perfect antidote for all this stuff. You take only what you can carry on your back. No more and certainly, in my experience, no less. And therein lies the proverbial rub. The ultimate problem is overestimating what you (and your husband) can carry 30 kms a day for weeks on end and underestimating what you can do without. Time to get back at the packing and do some realistic 're-estimating'..
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