At around 10:30am this morning, I was in a random cafe in town I couldn’t name for you 5km away from my destination, in the middle of a sandwich. I felt a hand press down on my shoulder. I had no idea who it was.
Yum!
How would you react?
I turned around in excitement to see who it was - ah! A friend I had met a few weeks ago - we hadn’t seen each over for a few days, so we caught up while he ordered a Coke.
It dawned on me afterward what a unique reaction, all things considered, I had the privilege to experience.
Around a week ago, I met an American from Washington state on the trail. Around halfway through our conversation (we were talking about American politics), she mentioned that as I approached her from behind, she didn’t bother to turn around and see who I was or what I was holding or any of that, because I was most likely just another pilgrim or a local minding their own business.
But she confessed that she almost turned around out of the habit drilled into her in the US by necessity of safety. Especially when alone.
It is so fascinating to me that the Camino is a haven of safety for its pilgrims, many of whom are traveling alone and many of whom are traveling abroad.
I have grown to think of the Camino as a simplified alternate world that can be a model for the more complicated world that we (and I will unfortunately have to, in a few days) inhabit. I’ve talked about some of the assumptions the Camino world makes in its simplifications, the most notable one being that of abundance:
But another built-in feature that is not so easily achievable in the real world, with perhaps significant overlap with abundance, is safety. I have never felt unsafe as a solo traveler on the Camino. There is no space to store belongings that isn’t communal in albergues, and it has never bothered me. It has never made me worried (beyond a very temporary thought) to sleep in the same room as up to 30+ “strangers.” I don’t worry about leaving my phone in a charging port somewhere in the hostel, even as “we are not responsible for personal liability” signs sometimes adorn the walls (a peak of the real world right there!).
Why? Or maybe more provocatively, what does the real world do wrong that the Camino does right?
First, I would very clinically argue that safety between pilgrims is a matter of strategic selfishness. If I do something bad to you, what’s to prevent the opposite? All the spaces are communal anyway. I argue earlier in both pieces related to Intentional Coincidence that the Camino is designed for people to run into each other several times throughout the month, creating opportunities to get to know each other. There is more social accountability against acts that threaten safety when said society is more tight knit and capable of diffusing information quickly amongst its members.
I had a conversation a while back with someone on a gap year before the start of college, who was walking the Camino with her dad. She explained to me that part of her motivation was to experience some of the social idiosyncrasies of college before college itself - the shared living space “dorm” and the intentional coincidences that result in friendship. This was such a profound moment for me because I had not before built that bridge, and I am halfway through college.
But college is similar, albeit dependent on the size of the college population - if it’s small enough, a similar effect is achieved.
Second, abundance implies safety. There is no reason to steal because people are willing to share. Even a mindset of abundance is a safeguard against an unsafe environment.
Third and maybe most curiously, I would argue the Camino is filled with people who are bound together by a shared set of characteristics, and that similarity creates comfortability. We have all experienced the walk in rain and sun, from 15-35km per day. We have somehow drummed up the resource and courage to make the sacrifice to clear out at least a month (or at least a week) to make it here. We all share an interest in learning more about ourselves, through others.
As a general principle, however, this starts to feel like the inklings of a more problematic phenomenon. I experienced the same “don’t worry about locking your doors” safe haven last summer, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether part of this was due to the fact that the town I inhabited was >95% one ethnicity. It was practically ethnically homogenous.
This begs the question to what extent someone can be “safe rather than sorry” until they start to just come off as plain discriminatory. Can a Hindu from India who owns a restaurant refuse to serve a Muslim from Pakistan out of fear for safety, or the other way around?
Can a white woman in the US call the cops preemptively on a black man for acting in a threatening (according to her) manner?
This is why I felt it to be such a privilege to have the experience I had this morning at the cafe, and all throughout the Camino. In a world characterized by framing in division and framing out commonality, the Camino is outstanding at shaping the environment around us to framing in commonality and framing out division.
A sign offering free hugs!
And it gives me hope and makes me excited. Because the way to solve a hard problem is to make it simpler and solve the simpler problem first. We’ve done that.
So let’s get to working.