I left Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the second of January, which is not when most people leave. The pilgrim office was half-shuttered, the woman behind the counter looked at me the way people look at someone who has made a mild but irreversible error in judgment, and the mountains above the village were carrying a thin skin of ice that the guidebook politely describes as "challenging in adverse weather." I had a pack that was too heavy, boots that were adequately broken in but not gloriously so, and — this is the part that took me the longest to understand — absolutely nothing I needed to solve. No deliverable. No deadline. No one waiting on a decision from me. I had taken six weeks from my practice at Vault Mind CoreShift, told my clients the truth about where I was going, and walked out into the kind of cold that makes your thinking very simple and very immediate. What I did not expect was that the simplicity would not stay simple — that somewhere around Burgos, or maybe before that, maybe on the meseta between Logroño and Nájera where the light goes flat and prehistoric, something would shift in the way I was thinking, and I would come home understanding something about cognition and creative work that I had been telling clients for years without quite believing it myself.

The first week is just noise leaving the body

I had read enough accounts of long walks to know that the first several days are not the walk itself — they are the decompression chamber, the hiss of pressurised professional life equalising with something slower. What I had underestimated was how long that decompression actually takes. I spent the crossing of the Pyrenees — that brutal, gorgeous day over the Roncesvalles pass — thinking almost exclusively about an engagement I had postponed, a proposal I had left half-finished, a conversation with a client in Amsterdam that I kept replaying with different endings. I was walking through one of the more dramatically beautiful landscapes in Europe with my mind entirely elsewhere, which is something I now describe to people as the neurological equivalent of jet lag: your attention is still in the timezone you left. It wasn't until somewhere around Pamplona, three days in, that I noticed I had stopped rehearsing those conversations. Not because I had resolved them, but because the body had begun to take up so much of the available processing — the blister on my right heel, the exact calculation of whether I needed my rain cover yet, the animal satisfaction of a café con leche in a bar full of other cold, damp people — that there was simply no bandwidth left for the recycled professional anxiety. This was not meditation. It was more like exhaustion deployed strategically.

What the meseta actually is

Everyone warns you about the meseta. It is the long flat interior plateau of Castile, roughly two hundred kilometres of walking that lacks, by most aesthetic standards, anything obviously rewarding to look at. No drama, no sudden views, no charming medieval towns every eight kilometres. Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust that walking is 'the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body,' and on the meseta I began to understand what she meant by the word unwilled — because there is nothing out there to will yourself toward, no landmark to tick off, and so the walk becomes almost involuntary, like breathing. What I found, unexpectedly, was that this was precisely when my thinking became most useful. Not busy, not productive in any conventional sense, but — precise. Problems I had been circling for months would resolve themselves, not through effort but through a kind of patient waiting, as if the answer had always been there and the noise of normal working life had simply been too loud for me to hear it. I thought about a framework I had been trying to articulate for a client in Copenhagen — something about the difference between strategic clarity and strategic confidence — and on a grey Tuesday somewhere between Burgos and León, walking into a headwind that smelled of frozen earth, I suddenly understood the distinction with a completeness I had not managed in three months of meetings and documents.

Slow time is not empty time

There is a version of this essay that would argue for idleness, for doing nothing, for the radical act of the blank afternoon. I don't think that's quite right, or at least it wasn't what the Camino gave me. The walking was not nothing — it was continuous, low-intensity, embodied effort sustained across eight to nine hours a day. What it was not was cognitively demanding in the way that screen-based knowledge work is cognitively demanding. The neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang has written about the default mode network — the neural circuitry that activates during mind-wandering and inward reflection — and how chronically under-resourced it is in people who never allow their attention to drift. Sustained, unstructured time is not the same as rest; it is the condition under which a particular kind of integration happens. The Camino enforced this integration for six weeks. I read in the evenings — Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. in a small albergue in O Cebreiro, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead in a pension in Ponferrada — and I noticed that I was reading differently than I do at home: slower, more inclined to stop and sit with a sentence. I think the walk had done something to my pace of intake.

The particular quality of winter

Going in January matters, I think, in ways beyond the obvious ones of cold and solitude. The Camino in summer is a social infrastructure — pilgrims every few metres, queues at albergues, the collective energy of a shared project that can be both sustaining and, if you are prone to it, a way of outsourcing your inner life to the group. In January you can walk entire mornings without seeing another person. I went through stretches of the route — particularly after Astorga, climbing into the hills of O Cebreiro — where the silence was so complete it had texture. A friend of mine, a poet named Elena who had walked the route in June, told me afterward that she was almost jealous. 'You actually got to be alone with it,' she said, which is the right way to put it. There is something about the stripped winter landscape, the bare vines, the low grey light, the sound of your own boots on frost-hard earth, that makes it easier to think in first principles. The summer Camino is about companionship; the winter Camino is about whatever you brought with you.

What I brought home, and what I have done with it

I returned to work in mid-February, tanned in the odd Iberian winter way — face and hands dark, the rest of me very pale — and I sat down with my first client of the new year, a founder in Berlin who had been struggling with a strategic decision for several months, and I noticed immediately that I was listening differently. Not better, exactly, but more slowly. I was letting pauses last longer before I filled them. I was less interested in the next clever thing I might say and more interested in what he was actually telling me, which is not the same thing. Over the months since, I have tried to hold onto this and largely failed in the way you fail at most things that require sustained structural change. But some things have stuck. I now take one full day a week with no screen and no agenda — not a productivity hack, just a condition. I walk more, specifically more urban walking without headphones or a destination, which sounds like nothing but accumulates into something. And I have become, I think, more honest with clients about the difference between the kind of thinking that happens in a meeting and the kind that happens in the shower, on a long train, in the middle of a walk in the Grunewald on a Tuesday afternoon when no one expects you to be anywhere. I had always known this distinction existed. The Camino made me believe it.

What this suggests about how we structure creative work

If I were going to draw anything practical from six weeks of walking — and I am wary of tidying the experience into lessons, because the experience resists tidiness — it would be something like this: the conditions under which genuinely new thinking happens are almost entirely incompatible with the conditions of normal knowledge work. Normal knowledge work is reactive, interrupt-driven, output-oriented, and socially legible — you can show someone a deck, a document, a decision. The kind of thinking that actually changes how you understand a problem is none of those things. It is slow, associative, often indistinguishable from not thinking, and it requires a tolerance for not knowing that most organisations actively punish. Walking the Camino in winter did not teach me anything I could not have eventually learned by other means. But it compressed the education into something I could not ignore, because there was nowhere to look except inward, and no way to mistake the quality of the thinking I was doing for real work. Which is its own kind of gift.

I am writing this from my desk in Brussels, where I moved last autumn, and it is raining in the particular way Brussels rains — steadily, without drama, as if it has always been raining and will continue to do so indefinitely. I have a long walk planned for this weekend. I have no particular reason to do it and nothing I intend to figure out. I have learned, finally, to trust that this is enough.