Stop Taking the Shortcut
How backpacking across Spain has changed my perspective on “saving time.”
“It’s crazy how we walk hours for what would have been a 20 minute drive,” my friend Maeve said as a taxi blew passed us. We had been dragging ourselves up the edge of a highway for the dreaded last 5 km of our daily hike on el Camino de Santiago.
Sitting at around 506,030 square kilometers, the entire country of Spain is slightly smaller than Texas. Spending every day for almost 3 weeks now walking across its countryside, I’ve begun to see travel and distance in a completely new light.
Some of the most fundamental components of our society, the things we depend on more often then we think, are modes of accelerated transportation: cars, airplanes, trains, etc. We use them thoughtlessly and frequently.
The limited access I have had to these things on the Camino, as well as the reduced time I have spent on my smartphone, have allowed for me to consider more deeply how they have influenced our world. Both cars and smartphones (specifically social media) function to reduce travel, to shrink our distances, and to make our big world smaller. They connect people and things in ways that otherwise never would have been able to be connected.
I love driving. I love being behind the wheel, and I love riding shotgun. I love riding with the windows down, blasting music with my friends; I love driving by myself, cruising down a quiet road to some John Mayer. Something about it just feels so liberating. Maybe it’s the speed we move at, or the memories I have with my friends. I’m not sure.
On the Camino I walk everywhere, everyday. Up until today, when I was forced to take a taxi to the next town due to my falling victim to the hostel stomach bug, I had not been in a moving vehicle since taxing from the airport. It felt strange that it was so easy to skip the 5 hours of walking my fellow pilgrims would be doing today. It felt wrong, how quickly and effortlessly the car was able to pass my friends on the side of the road.
I began to wonder, is the accessibility of accelerated modes of transportation really such a good thing? It was a thought that felt crazy, because I had grown up believing that cars were a revolutionary invention which made travel and thus daily life so much easier for the common man. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that cars and the time they save us might not really be good for us.
I posed this question to a few of my pilgrim friends, regarding whether or not it is better that we don’t have to walk places anymore. Or, more broadly speaking, whether or not the inventions that have made our everyday lives “easier” have truly been good for us.
“We’re not supposed to live like this,” my friend from the Netherlands, Lydia, had said. In her view, the extent to which inventions like the car have allowed for our lives to speed up has surpassed any amount that could have possibly had a positive effect on society. Many of the anxieties that humans feel about daily life can stem from the fact that we are simply moving too fast.
My Australian friend, Dan, agreed. Although without cars we may not be able to visit other cities or work in nearby towns, our lives would be simpler, and we would feel no need to reach beyond the village we grew up in and the life we had made for ourselves there. For Dan, the village lifestyle was uncomplicated and unproblematic, and thus, better.
Perhaps it was not the invention (of the car) itself that was bad, rather it was how overtime we seem to have forgotten what this invention actually does. Our inability to understand just how much time we are saved when we hop in a car, or the fact that we have never tried to walk the 20 minute drive to work, maybe this is the problem. Our disconnectedness with life before we had invented certain things prevents us from comprehending the actual distances we traverse every day. It’s hard to appreciate the short cut when you’ve never taken the long route.
Shortcutting seems to be the nature of our society. We cut corners anywhere we can; we find shortcuts for the shortcuts. It’s sad, really; I never knew how fond I was of walking because driving and public transit were always easier options, and who doesn’t want to do what’s easier?
What walking the Camino has done for me is that it has brought me back to the basics. It has made me more aware of what cars, planes, and trains are actually doing, and how exactly they have made our lives easier.
When a car whips past me as I’m walking on the Camino, I get a feeling that I can only compare to seeing someone rush through an art exhibit, hardly glancing at half of the pieces. Or worse, a reminder of a time when I felt myself moving through an exhibit too fast; a time when for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to admire the pieces for as long as they deserved. I feel that way when I consider how much I have been missing out on when I drive. Not just the scenery, but the time to contemplate and escape from the pressures of everyday life; a time where my only concern is putting one foot in front of the other.
I guess the problem is that this is time that most people don’t have. I’m only a student but I already see how dependent we are on time-savers. We can do so much more in a day because it doesn’t take us 4 hours to walk to work or the grocery store.
This is nice, I guess, our ability to do so many different things in a single day. It’s also a little overstimulating. It’s almost as if, because these time-savers are available, we feel compelled to fill the extra time with as many activities as we can. I think people forget that sometimes it can be okay to slow down.
Slowing down on the Camino has changed my life in ways that I can’t begin to explain, or perhaps even understand myself. It’s like I’ve gone back into that art exhibit, really looked at all the pieces, and then with astonishment realized just how much I had missed. How easily had I skipped over things, beautiful things, I can’t even begin to comprehend.
I also wonder about the distances we have between each other, and how shortcuts like the internet have affected us. If you take away all of the shortcuts, it would take me 525 hours to walk from Astorgas, Spain and have a face to face conversation with my friend who is studying abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark. With shortcutting, it would take me two seconds to FaceTime her.
It seems to me that the internet and smartphones function the same as cars do, where they aim to reduce the distances between us. Things like FaceTime are definitely successful at this, but forms of social media like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook have amazingly found a way of doing the opposite.
These platforms were designed to create a space where individuals can connect and share their lives with one another. The problem is that the things we choose to display are selective and they create the illusion of a life that most people are not really living. These displays have becoming increasingly false as time goes on, and they continue to estrange us from not only each other, but from our true selves.
Social media platforms would in theory allow for us to “keep up” with people faster and more easily, if it were not false projections of ourselves that we were choosing to display. In choosing to devote so much time to the cultivation of our social media feeds, we miss out on the present moment, and we spend less and less time caring about forming authentic connections.
On the Camino you meet people the authentic way. You bump into them in the hostel bathrooms, you discover them in ditches off the side of the path (true story), or you find yourself walking at the same pace as them for 25 km. You don’t find them on social media beforehand, and if you ever see them online it’s not until after a genuine connection has already been formed.
Social media’s attempts at shortcutting human connection have been weak at best, and counter-productive to the whole process at worst. However, even if it were possible to shortcut connection building, I wouldn’t want to. The phase in a friendship where you first begin to connect is beautiful and special. I would choose to have those memories over any shortcut that social media has tried to create, every time.
I don’t want to miss out on things anymore. I want to treat every day like its own art exhibit that I’m privileged to experience and marvel at. I want to notice things more. I want to sit in the sun for no reason other than to feel the embrace of its rays. I want to enjoy a conversation with someone without wondering who their friends are or what their instagram looks like. I want to walk without consideration for my destination. I want to wander aimlessly, without pressure or expectation, as I consider what is it I will do with my “one wild and precious life”. (Mary Oliver)
