Letter to Myself

Dear Me,

This is a letter to yourself. You’ve just walked the Camino de Santiago. You spent nearly 40 days on foot, living out of a rucksack, hiking the breadth of Spain. You had very little material possessions. Two T-shirts. Two pairs of pants. One roll of toilet paper.

The rest of your belongings consisted of whatever food you could scare up in rural, sometimes almost third-world-like villages. Thank God, these villages ALWAYS had chocolate.

You learned many things on your pilgrimage to Santiago. And I don’t want you to forget them. So, before the weight of modernized society begins to press on you, before you ease back into a life spent scrolling on your phone, I wanted to write them down and share these lessons with Future You.

Quit toxic people. That’s number one. You know who they are. You know what they want. They are narcissistic. They are selfish. They have no sense of humor, no sense of joy, they treat life like a war. Oftentimes, these people grew up with a constant crisis happening in the background of their lives. This has become their usual. They need a perpetual crisis to feel normal.

But recall the axiom you learned in Boy Scouts, long ago. “You should never enter the water to rescue a drowning person or they will kill you.” All you can do is throw them a float. The rest is up to them.

Also, don’t ignore that little voice in your soul. It has AMAZING things to say. And it’s always talking.

The voice is telling you to spend more time playing; less time working. More time praying, less time worrying. More time being silly; less time being a grown-up. “Have fun with your life,” the voice keeps saying, “while you still can.”

But you never listen to it. You’ve just got too much going on. Like a robin singing in the middle of an SEC Championship stadium, you just can’t hear it.

Which leads me to the other big thing you learned on your pilgrimage. Simplify.

And by “simplify,” I mean LET STUFF GO! You don’t need half the things you think you do to survive.

One example of this is all the meager suppers you ate on your pilgrimage. In the US, you were used to eating complete suppers, with food from each food group, including the Little Debbie food group. Your food would be sitting nicely on your plate. You’d have salt and pepper on the table. Iced tea. Silverware. Everything.

But in Spain, you had none of this. Sometimes, you were in villages without markets. So the only food you and your wife had with you was bread. On a few occasions, bread was all you had for the entire day.

Thus, you sometimes ate solely bread and wine for supper. And that was it. Nothing more. Then, you slept on the floor of a 11th-century church. And, look at you, you didn’t die.

Moreover, the bread was delicious. Not because it was well-made bread, it was crap bread. But you loved it anyway. And the next morning, as you ate this same granite bread for breakfast, an old Spanish nun explained things to you.

In her dry, ancient voice, she said, “A buen hambre, no hay pan duro.” (“When you’re hungry, no bread is too hard.”)

More tidbits.

Quit worrying. Almost all the things you worry about won’t happen.

Turn off the TV, quit reading the news so often. Yes, experts are constantly saying this world is about to explode, but here’s the thing: This world has ALWAYS been about to explode.

Yes, there will be wars, rumors of war, earthquakes, famines, and Daytime television.

Yes, there will be idiots out there, running around, shouting loudly, claiming to have “The Answer.” Don’t follow them. All they want to do is scare you. What they want is for people to band together and form sides. Religion, politics, and professional football is always an “Us versus Them” game.

But there is no Us and Them. There is no game. There is only This.

This thisness contains the fullness of God. THIS is all you need. And THIS is all you have. This, right here. This, right now. So quit writing this stupid letter to yourself, and get busy living.

You’ve already wasted enough time.

Questions: SeanDietrich@gmail.co
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Originally published on Sean’s website. Republished here with permission.

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