Maybe it is a rule: the more profound an insight, the more commonplace its expression.
In an earlier post I invoked Douglas Adams’ exhortation to “eff the ineffable.” I’ve always been disappointed with the literature of the Camino. Everybody says walking the Camino changes one’s life; nobody says how, other than platitudes. Here’s a commonplace, expressed as a set of rules for life:
Rule #1: Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Rule#2: It’s all small stuff.
It’s one thing to understand this, even to believe it, as an intellectual proposition. It’s something else to experience it as a practical matter. Walking is a form of meditation. One foot after another, left foot, right foot, at the end of the day there will be a bed, there will be a meal, and nothing else matters much. It is enough, and it is good. .
Small stuff: small is misleading. The flowering dill covered with snails by the side of the path is small stuff, but it is the stuff of life, a thing of beauty.
When our daughter Sam sat at Toni’s bedside, Toni said, “You’re all taking this way too seriously.” Like all of us off the Camino, Toni sometimes did sweat the small stuff. Nobody who knew her would have called her serene. But when it came to — what most of us would call — the big stuff, she loved her life, and accepted her death, as if to say, it was enough, and it was good.
My Camino with Toni 
Beautiful . With you still. Roz
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Snails! Big ones and by the road side! That looks like a whole meal, or would have so looked like to my grandfather José. In fact, that is how he is remembered by relatives in Sarria, a stage in your way forward: José would go out in the early mornings to collect snail in the fields. It is wonderful to read your writings.
Lito
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Hi Chris,
Sometimes one shouldn’t add to something that is expressed so well. … so I’ve already said too much!
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Chris – your posts are wonderful. I look forward to them, and visiting with you when you return.
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I am reading Toni’s words through you and feeling wistful-my eyes are glistening, but I wear a smile. You are giving me hope and a kind of peace. I return it to you with thanks.
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Sheila expresses my thoughts so beautifully and exactly. Thank you, Sheila and Chris, both.
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