Walking to recover time: pilgrimage as a practice of resistance after sixty

There comes a moment in life when you get up in the morning, look at the calendar and have the distinct sensation that the year is already over, even though you are not yet halfway through it. Meetings multiplying, notifications saturating every margin of silence, the persistent feeling of running on a treadmill somebody else controls.

This, according to some neuroscientists, is a subjective distortion of time: the more life is fragmented by digital interruptions and automatic routines, the more episodic memory compresses, and the faster perceived time runs. The paradox is geometric: we are more connected than ever, and we feel we have less time than ever. At sixty, this distortion reaches its peak. And it is precisely then that, for many, a road appears.

Before it became a codified spiritual practice, walking was the way human beings processed experience. Aristotle knew it, and taught while walking. Rousseau sensed it. Research confirms it today, measuring in walking a significant increase in creative thinking and a reduction in the biological markers of stress. But there is something pilgrimage adds to the simple stroll: direction. Walking toward something, even when that something is symbolic, activates a cognitive mode opposite to rumination — an embodied, concrete intention that occupies the body and frees the mind from the compulsion to produce.

At sixty, after decades of adapting to other people’s rhythms, walking in a direction of your own becomes an almost political act.

Over the past ten years the Camino de Santiago has undergone a quiet demographic transformation. More than half of the pilgrims now arriving in Compostela declare non-religious or mixed motivations. The sixty-to-seventy age bracket has grown fastest over the last five years. The phenomenon extends beyond Iberia: the Kumano Kodo in Japan, a UNESCO itinerary through the thousand-year-old sugi forests of the Kii Peninsula, records the same growth in older Western walkers. The Cammino di Francesco, which descends from La Verna to Assisi across the Umbrian Apennines, attracts a growing proportion of people each year who do not describe themselves as believers but who are seeking, as many testimonies gathered along the route put it, “something they do not yet have a name for.”

That something, however, has a precise phenomenology. Secular pilgrimage demands presence — the rarest form of luxury in an age of cognitive dispersion. A hundred-kilometre road requires real time, sustained attention, a body in motion. The body, in this, is the teacher. And at sixty, paradoxically, one is finally ready to listen to it.

There is an economic logic to pilgrimage tourism worth naming, because it reveals how far this phenomenon has already moved beyond a niche. The spiritual and wellness tourism segment is growing at rates the major hotel industry has begun to study closely. Pilgrims stay longer, spend more deliberately, and return. But the real economy of pilgrimage is an interior one, and it appears on no balance sheet. It is what some sociologists call eigenzeit — one’s own time, as distinct from other people’s time. At sixty, after four decades in which time belonged to companies, to children, to the market, pilgrimage offers something no resort can replicate: the reappropriation of one’s own biological rhythm. The human body walks at around five kilometres an hour. For millennia, that was the speed of the world. Then it became an exception. Returning to that speed is a recalibration, and like every recalibration, it changes how everything else reads.

People who come back from a long pilgrimage often report the same thing: time filled up with detail. The colour of stone at seven in the morning. The smell of rain on a wheat field. The moment when, after three hours of walking, the thought of the phone disappears by itself. Neuroscientific research describes this as the awakening of the “default mode network” — the brain network associated with processing identity and the sense of self, systematically suppressed by frenetic digital life and reactivated by rhythmic movement in unfamiliar environments.

At sixty, reawakening the sense of self is perhaps the most urgent work left to do. The real question is this: how many more years do you intend to live at somebody else’s pace?

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