After passing the beautiful town of Villafranca del Bierzo, George—my Swiss peer—and I started climbing toward Alto Pardela. Other pilgrims chose the easier route along the highway in the valley. We went for the harder but more scenic trail through hills and chestnut forests.
After a few hundred meters of steep ascent, we split up—George walked ahead, while I stayed a few hundred meters behind. We often did this when we wanted time alone, walking in silence. As I kept climbing, questions came to me: Why this Camino? Why this journey? What hidden meaning does it hold? And suddenly—an “epiphany”: I am walking to Santiago de Compostela with a backpack on my shoulders to defeat my ego. In Santiago, in about ten days, I will begin a new life.
I felt an incredible surge of energy, almost euphoric, in a kind of exalted state. I saw George within sight and started shouting joyfully, waving my arms. Later at dinner in the hotel, I told him what had happened. He looked at me and started laughing. When I asked what amused him so much, he replied: First, you might overcome your ego—but you’ll probably need a few hundred years for that. Second, if your ego really did die in Santiago, then your life afterwards would have no meaning—you couldn’t achieve anything important anymore.
After a moment of silence, we both burst out laughing. Of course, George was right. A thought crossed my mind: I don’t want to “die” yet—it’s too soon. I was glad this journey was just a stage, not an end…
After some time, a man sat down at the table next to ours. He seemed about our age and ordered food. He appeared distant. It turned out he was French, and George began talking with him in French. I only caught scattered words. After the man finished his meal and left the restaurant, George summarized their conversation.
The man had been on the road for a long time. His brother was waiting outside the hotel. It was his first meal in many days—and at the same time, his last supper. Literally the last one, because his goal was to walk himself to death from exhaustion. He no longer wanted to live; he believed the world had gone mad, was heading toward its end, and that the pandemic had only accelerated this.
The story seemed unbelievable. I thought: he must be insane. But a moment after he left, some commotion arose outside the hotel. I suddenly felt an absurd fear that this Frenchman, after his “last supper,” might pull out a hidden machine gun and end his life—and ours—right there in a massacre, the kind we sometimes read about in reports from the United States. Perhaps the earlier talk of death with George was still echoing in my mind…
Of course, nothing of the sort happened. There was no massacre. We never met the Frenchman again on our route, and I quickly forgot the incident. I never thought about him or how his story ended. Until recently.
In a conversation with a friend, I recalled my “epiphany” on the Camino—and suddenly, the memory of the Frenchman returned. For the first time, I thought that meeting him—on the very day when I was thinking about the symbolic death of the ego, and he was eating his last meal on the road to physical annihilation—was not accidental. Encounters like that matter. They are like signs, if we are able to notice and read them. Back then, I didn’t see the sign—I was the one absent in that restaurant.
My intuition tells me there is a hidden message for me in this story. But perhaps I’m not yet ready to read it…
And you—what signs are you noticing in your life?