Weighted

I wrote this essay in september 2022 for a dutch blog about living with chronical illness.

"What if possession is an emotional weight you can't bear sometimes?" I look at my friend again. I had just walked the Camino, which had been a road of mostly letting go and discarding. Indeed, from the start, my backpack had been too heavy.

From the start.

In the little office at the starting point, where you sign up for the Camino, I had to hang my rucksack on a hook.

"No, no, this too heavy for you!"

The man walked over to the bag, took it off and, in his broken French-English, commanded me to take stuff out, put it in a bag and have it stored in the little warehouse behind the little office. I was keen to walk the tour to the end, so meekly I followed his instructions, while he silently looked over my shoulder.

"Why many blankets?"

Because it's winter and I must be cold in my summer sleeping bag?

"Alberge has blankets!"

And lo and behold, they went into the bag. As also an extra bar of soap, thermal trousers and a thick woollen jumper.

"You will be warm. No worries."

He was right, not only was I warm while walking, but there were plenty of blankets in the hostels. Yet my backpack was still too heavy. I had opted for an extra small one, of only 30 litres, and still it felt like a house of weight was hanging on my shoulders. After less than two days, my knee also started to struggle. I didn't understand it at all, especially when, during lunch in a park in a small Spanish village, a man lifted my 'too heavy backpack' off the bench like a light feather and put it on the ground. I saw the surprise on his face, he that on mine.

So what else was I lugging around?

What transpired, much later, was that the excess weight was mostly a lot of emotion.

I had put a lot in my backpack and so it also took up a lot of space. Because I had to empty my entire backpack every night to get to my sleeping bag, I also had those sometimes unnecessary items in my hands every day. After two weeks of stuffing everything into my backpack over and over again, they started bothering me in the long run.

I was overstimulated by too much stuff.

For at least half of the forty-four days I walked, I took out something every day: put a book away on the bookshelf in the hostel, put a t-shirt in the lost and found bin and left talismans in special places along the route. But without realising it, I left a lot more behind.

On the Camino, sometimes I walked alone, sometimes in groups. There were nights when I had the whole hostel to myself, but also when the dormitory was full. Sometimes I ate together, sometimes I ate alone. But always I felt that I was travelling with several souls on the same path towards the same goal. Even if sometimes I didn't see the other pilgrims, I met them in other ways: paintings along the way, signposts full of sayings, an arrow laid from stones. That and my backpack with only what I did need gave me a sense of connection, of richness, of abundance.

Somewhere halfway through the trek, in the morning I left the inn where I had slept alone that night, feeling like I had forgotten something. I walked back into the dormitory and searched every corner, locker and hanger. There was nothing under the beds either.

It was the weight of my backpack!

With everything stuffed neatly into it, with room for a litre of water, a piece of cheese, bread and a banana, it felt lighter than ever. Silently, I accepted the small talisman the innkeeper gave me as a farewell. The unnecessary had disappeared from my backpack, the necessary I had with me and so that weighed almost nothing. But most of all, I think, I had left something else behind: the urge to walk the Camino at the pace of a group of 20-year-old blokes, the idea that I would never make it alone and the fear of the thunderous silence if I walked alone.

So a tidy backpack not only meant less weight on my back, but also less weight in my head.

On returning from my walk, I didn't actually want 'more'. I wanted less. I no longer wanted to cling to the past, but neither did I want to look for security in the form of stuff. So when I opened my suitcase, I asked myself: what do I still want to keep?

That whole search led me back to the question of how I actually wanted to live my life. Because in our consumer society, it is a habit to keep buying without realising why we are doing so. Often enough, it is to fill a void or to cover up a feeling. A feeling of insecurity or of inferiority.

The problem is, what we unconsciously buy takes up space. In the house, in the basement, in the attic and in my backpack, without resolving the underlying feeling.

So it's logical that my friend perceived possession as an emotional weight: it takes time, it takes money and it takes headaches. Because possession requires maintenance, but it also requires a maintenance you can't just dust off with a feather duster. It is linked to a memory, to an incident in the past, to a negative feeling you don't want to acknowledge. The question is whether you want to be constantly reminded of it, whether you want to be constantly occupied with it.

The answer to the question of how I wanted to organise my life was therefore quickly clear to me: simple, with less stuff, but in connection with my surroundings and with a sense of richness. And I found that in an unusual way, in a tiny house in a small valley in southern Spain.

As small as my little house is, when designing it, I made space mainly for people, for us and for those who would visit us.

That's why my mini living room is sometimes a quiet place where I can safely retreat, but sometimes also as big as a ballroom.

With Love,

Daphne