"This is going to be good"! - Monday, April 11, 2011

My intent throughout these Camino walks is to stay positive and not whine but sometimes that's pretty tough. Not meaning to brag but I think whining is one area in which I can really excel. My backpack is too heavy, my boots are soaked from the rain, mud is packed four inches thick on the soles of my boots, there hasn't been a cafe stop in hours, the guidebook is incorrect and what do you mean we have another 8 kms to go, I'm hot and out of drinking water, there's no hot water for a shower and there's nothing for a vegetarian to eat. The list can go on and on and on. But you have to dig deep to find that positive attitude that gets you through each day and also stops your walking partner from wanting to throttle you or worse desert you. When the going gets tough, the tough pull up their big girl underpants and get on with it. So I try to keep those negative and whining thoughts to myself and find a personal positive mantra to motivate me. I think this camino's mantra will be 'this is going to be good'. When I was teaching high school dance, I would have these wild choreographic ideas directing the dancers to run, spin, drop and roll, cross and leap and 'don't collide'! Expecting the worst, I would warn them that my idea could be more chaos theory than creative artistry. Then I took company class with David Earle, modern dancer and one of the founders of the Toronto Dance Theatre. David would outline his complicated choreographic patterns and then, instead of foreshadowing impending disaster, he would just rub his hands together and declare "this is going to be good"! That simple phrase and attitude really resonated with me. So now I'm going to channel that positive spirit for our upcoming Camino. Rather than worrying that we will be arriving in France on Easter Sunday and everything will assuredly be closed; that we will follow up over 24 hours of travelling with a 29km walk our first day, or that my new boots are still not broken in and my pack is still too heavy, I will just chant my little mantra, "this is going to be good, this is going to be good, this is going to be good".