The Thought Process

The same Cafe Bar Espana

Imagine if time truly conformed to your emotional responses. That is, imagine a world in which the moment you get word of bad news, time stretches to a point of near standstill while you process and experience the emotions that the bad news elicits. Imagine a world in which the moment you feel an ecstatic moment of euphoria time dilates so as to allow you to feel the warmth for as long as it will last on its own before another emotion or thought interferes with the pure glee. Alternatively, in the same world, time would seem to contract and speed up through the moments where emotions are neutral or subdued.

Perhaps this is how the Road is allowing me to process the past few years of my life. While walking an empty stretch of the Meseta, my mind will wander to a big event. With no additional stimuli to my brain, I’m able to clearly relive those moments in an unabridged way in my head. I can allow myself to feel the feelings all over again, but to take them slowly and understand why I felt and still feel each response that I had to every event.

The Road is teaching me how to relax my mind to concentrate on one thing at a time and let everything else go for the moment. Instead of holding tightly the reins controlling the direction of my head, I let the tides of thought push me in their currents from one event to another. By refusing to force my thoughts to be linear or chronological in any way, I seem to connect events on an emotional level. The related thoughts in my head are actually related by what I felt, not by what happened or when—a surprising revelation for me.

I hope that when I return from the Road to Santiago, I am still able to allow my mind to understand events on an emotional level—that I will find a way to block out the stresses and deadlines to enjoy reflective periods of time.