Lightening the load

In my backpack, I had a mandarin orange, a small one, weighing perhaps 3 ounces. When I bought the orange at the bomboneria (a new word for me, “grocery store” in Portuguese) the previous evening, I had stood in front of the vegetable bin eyeing the selection. I grabbed the two smallest, one in each hand, and tried to assess their weights because I had learned, this being my second Camino, my second attempt to carry everything I needed on my back, that everything weighs something.  

On my first Camino, almost exactly a year before, this obvious fact did not occur to me until it was too late, until after the fourth day walking with a featherweight pack that, although filled with featherweight gear, was too heavy for me. The deep bone pain it caused across my clavicles was not relieved by all manner of fixes (moleskin, sheepskin, sanitary napkin pads.) All those carefully/obsessively chosen, gram-weighed items added up to a load. Everything weighed something.

This Camino, up the spine of Portugal and through the northern part of Galicia in Spain, I was smarter. I ditched the 45L pack for a 32L, so I had far less room. I had learned what I actually needed. And it was far less than I thought. So off I went, clavicles happy, careful when I bought food for lunch or trail snacks that it weighed as little as possible.

I had learned the lesson about adding weight, or weight adding up. This Camino, I learned the reverse lesson: How it feels to remove the weight. When I removed that small orange from my pack and ate it sitting on a rock by the side of the path, when I hefted the backpack on my shoulders again and positioned the straps, it felt lighter. I felt the 3- ounce difference.

Huh, I thought: One very small item made a difference. And thus, an ah-ha moment that mirrored the one I had experienced on the previous Camino. Last year it was about the weight we carry emotionally, how all these little—and not so little—things in our lives add up. We stuff them in the “backpack” because we don’t have time to deal with them or we don’t want to deal with them or we think we don’t need to deal with them. And then, boom, the weight.

And now, lifting that lighter backpack, I think: You don’t have to process everything at once to lighten the emotional load. You don’t have to understand everything that has happened. You don’t have to heal every wound. You can just lighten the load one 3-ounce orange at a time.