The Planner
I was the person who colour-coded everything. Spreadsheets for holidays. Backup plans for backup plans. Running a marketing agency meant this served me well professionally. Personally, it was destroying me. My need to control every outcome had already cost me one marriage and was threatening the second.
My therapist suggested I do something unpredictable. My spiritual director went further: "Walk the Camino. Leave your laptop at home." I thought they were both being ridiculous.
800 Kilometres with No Plan
I started in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port with a backpack, boots, and the absolute minimum. No hotel bookings. No daily itinerary. No phone data plan. Just a yellow arrow pointing west and the vague understanding that Santiago was about thirty-three days away.
The first week was agony — not physically, though that too. The agony was having no schedule. Not knowing where I'd sleep. Trusting that there'd be a bed in the next albergue. My brain screamed at me to open Google Maps, to book ahead, to control something.
Where God Showed Up
Around day twelve, somewhere in the meseta — that vast, flat, endless Spanish plain where there's nothing but wheat and sky — I stopped trying to manage the experience. I just walked. For three hours, I walked without checking my phone or my pace or my progress. And in the silence of that monotonous landscape, I heard something. Not audibly. But clearly.
"You don't have to hold everything together. That was never your job."
I sat down on a stone wall and wept. Not pretty, cathartic tears. Ugly, exhausted, surrendered sobbing. Every kilometre after that was different. I started arriving at each village genuinely trusting something would be provided. And it always was — a bed, a meal, a conversation with a stranger that was exactly what I needed to hear.
Coming Home
My wife said I came back different. Less rigid. Less afraid. The Camino didn't fix my control issues permanently — I still have to work at that. But it broke the illusion that I was ever in charge. Eight hundred kilometres of putting one foot in front of the other, trusting the arrows, taught my body what my mind refused to learn.
What This Means for You
You don't need to walk across Spain. But if your need to control is choking the life out of your relationships, consider doing one physical thing that requires surrender. Pilgrimage, fasting, anything where your body learns what your mind won't accept — that letting go isn't falling. It's being caught.