As I was trudging up the day’s long &steep incline, a fellow pilgrim named Mike blew right past me in a most fit & quite impressive fashion, pausing just long enough to exchange a few pilgrim-pleasantries and inform me that he had been regularly walking around 50+ kilometers (that’s over 30 miles) over the past several days … :O :O :O

While I was impressed by his pace, I was in no way inspired to increase my own — a tribute to what some would call a greater maturity (and I called simple fatigue); a maturity that allowed me to pay more keen attention to my path; a more focused attention that allowed me to then notice a pair of glasses resting in the middle of the same … :O

I assumed they were Mike’s, picked them up gently, and proceeded to plod along up the steep way. Only a few minutes later I rounded a bend and saw Mike in the distance removing his pack and searching through his belongings … I called out to him from afar and waved the glasses in the air to signal that they had been found, and he walked back towards me with an obvious spring in his step. He was, of course, immeasurably relieved & immensely thankful that I had found his glasses & returned them to him. It turns out they were his only pair for the trip and he had been dreading losing them (much less walking back down the sharp hill to look for them).

There is nothing like an act of random kindness to open the door to Friendship, and that is exactly what Mike & I forged that day — a Friendship that lasted for the rest of our respective Camino’s, and a Friendship that indeed lasts to this very day … 😀

“What a strange thing it was, to build this castle in the air. For in the end we made a lasting friendship out of nothing, because nothing was all we had. It was the essence of what we both shared.” ~ via Ian Caldwell

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #02: Walking HOME (2019) by Scaughdt