The Camino de Santiago, the Via Francigena, the Cotswold Way, the Tour du Mont Blanc — the long-distance walking trail has become, for a growing subset of midlife women, one of the defining experiences of the second half of life.
The long walk is an experiment in what you actually need. You carry everything that is necessary for your survival and comfort. The weight is consequential. And so the question of what is necessary becomes, at last, an honest one.
The social dimension of trail walking is one of its great surprises. The self-consciousness that governs most social interaction tends to dissolve somewhere around the third day. What remains is often more honest and more interesting than most encounters in ordinary life.
The long walk teaches you, in ways that no other experience quite replicates, that you are capable of more than you thought — and that you need less than you imagined.
The women who come back from long trails transformed do not typically return having solved the problems they were carrying. They return having developed a different relationship with those problems: a patience, a perspective, a sense that most of what seemed urgent is, at trail-pace, not urgent at all.