On the trail—between dust and the idea of eternity—you can stumble into an unsettling thought: death is not simply the opposite of life. It can function as life’s boundary marker, the pressure that makes choices matter. Walking day after day toward an endpoint becomes a practical way to test what “being here” means.
On the twentieth day of the Camino, I stopped beside a medieval milestone: Km 147. Santiago was 147 kilometers away. I did the arithmetic: roughly 180,000 steps. I looked at my worn shoes and thought, how many steps are left in my whole life? One million? Two? Ten million, if I’m lucky?
For the first time, the number felt small. Finite. My steps are limited.
Sitting on a stone that has already lasted seven centuries—and will likely last long after me—I understood something that broke me and reassembled me at the same time: I will not be here. This road will continue. Others will walk it. Others will count the kilometers. But I—this specific configuration of matter that answers to my name—will disappear.
It wasn’t anguish. It was vertigo: the dizzy clarity of looking into an abyss and finding it looking back, not with hostility, but with a kind of sublime indifference. The world does not need me. It will continue without me. And that truth, instead of crushing me, made me feel free.
The everyday fiction of immortality
Most of us live as if we have endless time—not explicitly, not consciously, but in practice. We postpone difficult conversations. We withhold forgiveness. We delay journeys. We store resentments as if we had centuries to metabolize them.
Martin Heidegger described a version of this as living according to “the they”: defaulting to other people’s expectations, suspended in the assumption that there will always be time. Existence becomes waiting. Life becomes a waiting room.
On a long-distance route, that fiction is harder to sustain because everything ends in a visible, scheduled way. Each day finishes in a specific town. Each stage has a boundary. Each encounter has an expiry date. And Santiago—the destination that organizes every step—keeps approaching with steady inevitability.
“I needed twelve days to understand it,” says Thomas, a 53-year-old German philosophy teacher who began walking after his brother’s sudden death. “I treated death like an abstract idea. On the Camino I realized it’s concrete. It’s there, at the end of the route. And one day—maybe tomorrow, maybe in twenty years—there will be a last step. I won’t know it’s the last until it’s already behind me.”
This awareness is not necessarily morbid. It’s ontological: an encounter with finitude. The question stops being if I will die and becomes: what am I doing with the time between now and that certainty?
The ontology of a step
Walking has an unusual capacity to generate thought. Nietzsche claimed that truly great ideas arrive while walking, though he didn’t fully explain why.
Perhaps it’s because walking resembles existence: movement through space toward a horizon that keeps receding. Each step cancels the previous one—you are no longer there, you are here. Between steps there is a brief gap: a moment when you are neither where you were nor where you are going.
Some Buddhist philosophies speak of śūnyatā—often translated as “emptiness”—not as nihilism, but as the absence of a fixed, permanent substance. In that frame, you are not a stable “thing” that walks. You are a process: walking itself. And when you stop—when the route ends—what remains?
“On day fifteen I had an existential crisis,” says Marie, a French literature professor. “I realized my identity—professor, mother, wife—was made of roles. Performances. On the Camino, without the usual audience, who was I? The terrifying answer was: nobody. Or rather, nobody and everybody. I was just a person moving forward. And when I stopped moving—literally or metaphorically—there would be nothing left to perform.”
This is close to what Sartre described as nausea: the recognition that there is no fixed essence, only contingent existence. On the Camino, that recognition doesn’t always lead to despair. Often it produces a fierce lightness. If I’m not fixed, I can choose. If everything ends, then nothing carries absolute weight.
Markers of finitude along the way
Across Europe’s long-distance routes you see crosses: thousands of them. Some date to the medieval period. Others are recent, with flowers placed by someone grieving. Whatever one’s beliefs, their function on the landscape is difficult to ignore. They act as markers: someone ended here; you will end too.
Medieval monastic writers used the phrase contemptus mundi, sometimes translated as “contempt for the world.” In practice, it often signaled a hierarchy of values rather than simple rejection: the temporary passes, the enduring remains. Paradoxically, that perspective can intensify attention to what is temporary, precisely because it will not last.
“I saw a cross on a mountain pass,” says Juan, a 68-year-old Spanish walker. “It said a man died here in 1347 trying to reach Santiago. I cried—not for him, he died centuries ago, but for myself. I realized I might not arrive—not in Santiago, that part is manageable, but in the version of me I assumed I would become. Maybe I’ll die earlier. Maybe something in me will end right here, metaphorically. Then what matters?” The answer arrived as silence—acceptance, fear, peace, vertigo, all at once.
Time that doesn’t behave normally
Around the third week, many walkers describe a shift: time becomes strange. Days lengthen until they feel like whole lives. Weeks compress into a single blink. You look back and think, three weeks? You look ahead and think, four days to Santiago—how can that be?
Henri Bergson distinguished between measured time and lived time: clock time is uniform; experienced time expands and contracts. On the Camino, you live inside lived time. That can clarify something uncomfortable: it isn’t only the amount of time that matters, but the density of attention within it.
“My father died at 82,” says Isabella, an Italian walker in her forties. “People say, ‘At least he had a long life.’ But he spent decades in a job he hated, waiting for retirement. Did he live eighty-two years, or did he wait eighty-two years? On the Camino, in three weeks, I felt more awake than in three years of normal life.”
The route pushes a sharper question: not how long will I live? but how alive am I while I’m living? It is possible to feel dead long before the heart stops—deadened by routine, by habit, by the anesthesia of the everyday. It is also possible to feel intensely alive for a single moment: a sunset on a ridge, a conversation with a stranger, one step taken with full presence.
People you will never see again
On the Camino you meet people with whom you share an instant intimacy. Three days together can create a bond that ten years of polite acquaintance never would. Then one morning they are gone. Or you are. You may never meet again.
At first this feels like loss. Later it can feel like instruction. Emmanuel Lévinas wrote that the other person is always “elsewhere,” irreducible to our categories. You cannot possess another person; you can only meet them.
“I walked for three days with a Korean woman,” says David, an English pilgrim. “No shared language—she spoke Korean, I spoke English. We still communicated: gestures, silence, smiles. On the last day we cried and hugged. I don’t know her full name. I don’t know where she lives. But she changed something in me. That lack of closure felt perfect. It taught me you can care deeply without holding on.”
Modern culture often demands tidy endings. The Camino offers something different: encounters that matter and then dissolve into the horizon. Learning to let them go can be part of the practice.
Santiago and the vacuum after arrival
Then you arrive. Santiago—the endpoint that organized every step. Many walkers report the same sensation: a sudden emptiness, the blunt question now what?
As long as you are walking toward a goal, meaning seems straightforward. When the goal is reached, the deeper question surfaces: what was the goal protecting you from having to ask?
“When I arrived, I panicked,” admits Laura, a walker in her late thirties. “I thought: this was the purpose. Now that I’ve done it, what’s next? And after that? And at the end of all goals—what’s there?”
Later, she describes a shift. The emptiness didn’t feel like a void of meaning, but an open space. If there is no pre-assigned cosmic purpose, then the meanings we create—small gestures, daily choices, relationships—carry real weight because they are chosen.
Returning home with clarity
After the Camino, you return to work, family, bills. For many, this is where the real test begins: carrying an awareness of finitude into ordinary days—not as dread, but as lucidity.
“Before walking, I acted like time was infinite,” says Roberto, 67. “I postponed hard conversations. I withheld forgiveness. After the Camino, I called my brother—we hadn’t spoken in five years. I said, ‘We don’t have time for this.’ We made peace. Two years later he died of a heart attack. I live knowing nothing important was left unsaid.”
The Camino doesn’t answer the question of what comes after the last step. It makes the question sharper—and then, often, redirects attention to what can actually be lived: this step, this breath, this present moment. The past is finished. The future is not guaranteed. The thin thread of “now” is what we can meet directly.
And if you can meet this step with full presence—feet on the ground, attention awake—then perhaps, when the last step comes, you can meet it in the same way: without certainty, without rehearsal, simply moving forward into what you cannot see.
One foot in front of the other. Toward an unseen horizon. With the clearest tool we have: attention.
