Searching for the instruction manual

My Godmother says that there is no instruction manual for life and that sometimes you make the wrong decision. She´s right. After a few days of disconnect that feel closer to a month I resurface with nothing to say, but I will try to express my feelings through this medium.

The Camino is a blur. I don´t remember any of it at the moment, blisters seem familiar and so do certain names and faces. But when i try to put my finger on anything it´s like trying to look for detail in houses from a bullet train that is crossing a small town. Two days ago I was at the pharmacy and as I was paying I hear a "hello!" when I looked up, I had no idea who the person talking to me was. She asked if I remembered her but i said I didn´t, I must have had a conversation with her at one time because she knew my name was Veronica, I felt very embarrased and ashamed.

I´m not afraid anymore. There was a time when I was afraid of everything, what i chose to do, what i didn´t choose. Too afraid to make the wrong decision on the big things, I simply decided to make smaller ones until something came up. Many things did, but they just led me farther and farther from the things I wanted and more importantly, who I am.

There is an all purpose sentence that i have been hearing all the time and it seems to have seeped in to the point where I found myself repeating it today myself: "it´s the Camino". Something goes wrong "it´s the Camino", something goes right "it´s the Camino", something freaky happens "it´s the Camino". I plan to incorporate this in my daily life and whenever anything happens i will simply turn to people and say "it´s the Camino" at which point they will right me off as either crazy or Buddhist.

I wish life had instructions. I wish that you knew what step you needed to take and where you needed to go, but it doesn´t, and I´m starting to think that I prefer things that way.

I know that I have mentioned New York, London, New Zeland and a bunch of other places as my possible next destinations, but I have no idea whatsoever of where I will end up, and I´m OK with that now.

I have decided that Miami is not for me. Not its rhythm, not its layout, not its lack of mountains or valleys, and you can keep the Everglades.

The love that I have received throught his blog, both from people I know and don´t has been with me every step of the way, telling me it´s OK to be imperfect, it´s OK to not have all the answers, that in the end, it´s OK to just be me.

I thought I had to have all the answers in my life or that i was going to fail miserably and that scared the hell out of me. I was determined to get to Santiago no matter what. But I´m already where I need to be in my life. I´m already in Santiago, and the irony is that I know I´m going to physically get there, and to Finisterre, if I don´t it´s OK because it´s not where I was meant to go, but even if I do, i´ll still have to walk, every day.

I´ve slowed down these past days, and now I want to get back to putting one foot in front of the other, it´s hard to get back into the rhythm, but I realize that I don´t always have to be walking to move forward, that I don´t have to have a direction to get somewhere, that´s it´s OK to take a break, and that no matter how scared of snakes I am, they will not disappear. The snakes are everywhere even inside and it is those snakes that are the scariest. You just keep walking and you push through.

Sometimes I walk quickly and others slowly and sometimes I stop but now I know that no matter what I do or how fast I move, one day I will no longer be able to take a step, I hope that day is a long time away, but until that day I will move at my own pace, to my own tune and on my own path. I hope to see you there, but if I don´t be blessed on your path, because it´s the one you should be on.