What makes a place ‘home’? Is it the length of time you’ve lived there, or the people you live with? Since moving to Dublin from rural Louth three years ago, I have been asking myself this question; when is this city going to feel like home? While I knew the bus routes and the best spot for a bag of chips after a night out, the feeling of living in somebody else’s shoes had always persisted throughout my college career, and I had resigned myself to the fact that perhaps I was just not a ‘city person’. That is, of course, until now.
In the initial days of my virtual Camino journey, I had stuck to the familiar roads and routes that had served me in my first years of living in Dublin, in fear of the unknown. While I am generally an adventurous person, I had previously had little desire to explore beyond my backyard, for everything I thought I needed was just a bus-ride away.
When you’re walking for an average of 22km for four hours a day however, you tend to crave some new scenery. Little by little, I ventured further beyond my comfort zone and into areas of Dublin I had never even heard of, let alone visited, and got to know this big bright city for the first time.
The reality of life amidst the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to completely rethink and reshape the things in our lives which we had taken for granted and learn to live with ‘the new normal’. As college students, the realisation that our entire final year would be completed online and stripped of the true essence of college life was a tough pill to swallow.
While Zoom lectures and virtual hangouts with friends have taken a lot of getting accustomed to, the nature of this new form of learning has allowed me to take the classroom out into the world, learning as I go instead of being stuck to a desk all day. In this way, I can kill two birds with one stone, keeping up with lectures, meetings and webinars while taking in the glory of our capital city.
As I headed out my door twice and even three times a day to take on another leg of the journey, familiarities began to emerge. I nodded hello through the window of my tiny corner shop to the perpetually frazzled deli assistant, frantically preparing for the lunch rush of school students and builders racing in for their lunch-time roll.
I am a regular at my local coffee kiosk, neatly situated beside a football field to catch all of the parents dropping kids off to training. I know these people, my neighbours, my fellow city dwellers and I have lost the fear and apprehension that had cornered me into my tiny corner of the city. For the first time in three years, I feel truly at home.
As you can imagine, walking for such prolonged periods of time per day has given me a lot of time to think; to figure out what I need to do that day, to organise my thoughts, as well as lots and lots of contemplation and reflection. Prior to the first lockdown in Ireland, it appeared that the world was moving at an increasingly fast pace and everyone in it was racing to keep up.
This challenge has allowed me to take the time every day to really examine how and why I think and act in certain ways, and to consciously unpick the beliefs that I perhaps had not consciously come to of my own accord.
Aside from the obvious health benefits that my 690km has brought me over the past 28 days, I have learned so much about myself and what I am capable of. As my 5 weeks of walking comes to its conclusion this week, I have no doubt that a different version of myself will be walking across the finish line than the one who started out.