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So here I sit, on this rainy Sunday morning, it’s been just over a week since my return from the El Camino de Santiago.  And yet, it feels as if I returned three years ago, so much has happened.  I usually try to fit in a half hour nap during my day but unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the time for that it’s been that busy.  And here I sit and I think about the El Camino and how time over there seems to move much slower, it’s the perfect example for Einstein’s theory of relativity.  Something that happened to us last year really brought to home how time on the El Camino is a completely different concept to our view of time back here in our day to day life…

On Davor’s and my last day there (in Estrella), we took the bus back to Pamplona where we had been three days earlier.  Heavy of heart for we knew that we were heading back to reality, a sometimes harsh reality where there was always some sort of rush, somewhere to go, something to get done (and make it snappy!), we stepped on the bus and slowly made our way back to Pamplona to then take a bus to Barcelona and then back home on a plane.   Slowly is a relative term.  For it was on this bus ride that I for the first time really learnt how relative time was.  Like I mentioned, we had been in Pamplona three days earlier on foot.  The bus ride took us all of three hours.  Three days on foot = three hours by bus, probably much faster by car.

That thought hit me like a double whammy for several reasons.  First, it made me realise how much our world has sped up since Medieval times when most people went around walking, unless you had a horse.  I asked myself, when did time start speeding up or was it a gradual shift?   I mean, a day still 24 hours in it, that hasn’t changed, we don’t orbit around the sun any faster than we did thousands of years ago.  It’s sad to say that even the El Camino has “rushed up” since my walk last year.  This year some days we had to literally run to our daily destination because there were so many people on the path and so few places in the albergues…

Second of all, it made me think about how to transpose the almost “timelessness” of the El Camino into my every day life.  Was it at all possible to do?  When I got back I realised that it was near impossible.  With three kids (one with ADHD), an ill mum and a zoo full of animals, my time is rarely my own.  But there were some things that I could do to at least make it seem as if there were more hours in the day – cut down on the internet, sometimes turn a blind eye to housework, not watch so many episodes of “Ancient Aliens” and do things that are important to me – sing, play the ukulele, read a book…

Last of all, it made me think about what time is.  Is it money, as the old adage goes?  Does it have healing properties (time heals all wounds)?  Do we often times waste it wantonly?  I don’t know.  But my first question reminds me of a story Du told me recently of a friend in a high pressure job who wanted out because he had no time to do the things he truly loved.  So he came to his boss and threatened that if he didn’t give him a 60% pay rise, he was out.  To his surprise, his boss gave him the pay rise.  So now he has 60% more income to disperse but no more time than before…

Do I have a conclusion?  Nope.  I’m still as baffled by time as I was before.  All I know is that our time here is limited.  Try to find the time to do the things you love even if it means having a sink full of dishes and a laundry full of washing 😉  Or as Gary Vaynerchuk put it: