Signs along the way

 As you are going along The Way (and by The Way, I mean The Way of St. James, the Camino de Santiago), you see signs. Some are obvious. They boldly announce that you are on the right path. Or they unmistakably point you in the direction you need to take.On the Camino these can be big, brilliant yellow arrows, or turquoise blue signs with canary yellow clamshells, or concrete waymarkers with kilometer counts. Sometimes these signs are eye-level and hard to miss. Sometimes they are painted on the sides of barns or fences or stone walls, faded, barely visible. Sometimes they are little plaques embedded in the road, easy to miss unless you are looking down.Sometimes, especially in Galicia, these signs greet you so often that you stop seeing them. Other times you can go a long way without seeing a sign, and you are concerned that you have lost the way, and just as that concern is about to turn to worry or even into something darker, you see a sign. The relief borders on exaltation.And then there are the times you see no sign at all, but you see a person walking way ahead on the road, or you see the light of their head lamp. Although you may never catch up, never know who this person is, you feel gratitude and friendship. This happened to me along the Camino a number of times when I started alone in the pre-dawn hours. It brought to mind that E.L. Doctorow quote I am so fond of that I have used it in just about every talk I’ve ever given about the process of writing:  “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”And that, really, is how I made my way: from sign to sign, by the light of my head lamp, by the distant light of someone else’s. Seeing just what needed to be seen to take the next step.Now two weeks home, I am thinking: I wish life was like the Camino and every so often, just when you needed it, there was a sign to tell you, to reassure you, that you were on the right path. And then I think: Maybe life is like this, but we don’t know what the signs are, or we ignore the signs, or we are just looking elsewhere.