How Do You Feel After Your Pilgrimage Through This Year?

The point of a pilgrimage

We have all been on a long pilgrimage through this year. How did it go? How do you feel as you face another year? This is a photo I took in the Japanese Gardens in Toowoomba, Queensland, a year ago.

Whether you realise it or not, you have been on a pilgrimage this year.

You have been a stranger in a strange land.

On the first day of January this year, you took your first step into the figurative land of 2025.

If you plan to walk the Shikoku Pilgrimage in Japan, the Pilgrims’ Way in England or the Camino de Santiago in Spain, you can buy maps, organise a timetable, check availability of shops and water, make bookings to rest your weary feet.

However, for the pilgrimage we take each year of our lives, there is no map, no timetable, no guarantees of the availability of anything, no bookings possible.

Of course, we make annual plans, plot our weeks, schedule daylight hours into neat slots. But the year as a whole, and even in its individual moments, is still an enormous, mysterious land. We never know what we’ll find under our feet or what’s waiting to surprise, shock or knock us off around the corner.

All pilgrims face the unknown.

There could be:

• challenging mountains to cross

• rivers of tears to negotiate

• dark valleys of heavy thoughts to stumble through

• cooling forests of recovery

• dragons of the past blocking the path

• strangers

• rockfalls

• uplifting views

Whatever you encountered in the land of 2025, here you are, only days away from the end of this pilgrimage.

So, let’s ask ourselves some questions.

What did I experience?

What did I find?

What did I come to understand?

What did I believe in January that I now know in December isn’t true?

What happened that I didn’t expect?

What made me stop in my blood-soaked socks and listen?

The Point of a Pilgrimage

Why do people go on pilgrimages?

The point of a pilgrimage is to bring about inner transformation.

All pilgrimages are spiritual.

Your life is spiritual.

During your pilgrimage this year you have been slowly, maybe imperceptibly, transforming spiritually from the inside out with every step you took.

Perhaps the longest pilgrimage in the world is Abraham’s Path, in the Middle East, coursing for 2,000 kilometres through Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Israel and Jordan.

To complete that journey, the pilgrim, no matter how eager they are to get to the end and leap into the air with exhausted joy, can only take one step at a time.

And in our yearly pilgrimage we have that limitation as well.

One step, one moment, at a time.

For a pilgrimage to be most effective, pilgrims must be conscious of each step they take.

The more conscious they are at each step, the more they transform.

So, here are two questions we can ask ourselves as we walk our pilgrim path:

• How conscious am I of this step I am taking?

• How much consciousness am I allowing to flow into this moment?

We’re here to accept the imminent unknown, to take steps knowing we have all we need for this moment, and to embrace the deeper meaning of ourselves and one another.

I’ve loved writing to you each week this year and look forward to sharing more writing as we pilgrimage together through the unknown land of 2026. 

Love, Marlane