Courage

I woke up this morning thinking about what is courage? I met a woman yesterday who simply walked out of her life in Germany and started walking the camino from her door. She has been walking since May and has not even thought about stopping. Is that courage? She told me she hoped she was walking to something and not from something. It dawned on me that you can´t really walk to something without walking away from something. For example you can´t go to the grocery store and not leave your house. In my anti-camino I needed to be willing to leave everything behind to walk to my future. What will be most interesting is what will I have left when I do actually return. I really don´t think it took that much courage to leave. For me it was very difficult to get moving but once on the way.. ok. But I would not call that courage but perhaps a great deal of determination. To me the most courageous part of this journey is to return to the people and place that I started from as a different person and to build from there. Here on the camino we are all in the same place, the camino bubble, so we get courage from the others in our shared experience. Each Pilgrim although different share in the common journey and challenges. Home? Well although everything has changed for me, time as home is just as it always is, another month in another year has passed. Time on the camino is both slow and expanded at the same time so we have the opportunity for more movement and change than the average person living their everyday life. Time will go back to normal for me in a couple of weeks. So although I am excited to come home, I think about how will it all be? How can\will I integrate the new me into my old place? (this new me is a bit smaller though so may not fix exactly in old clothes) but at first fitting is all that I have. I can´t create until I see where I am. So the real courage is not to walk away, anyone can do that, the true test of courage is can I come back to begin again?