What Walking Backwards Reveals About Letting Go

When I was sharing our plans for our next performance with friends, I could see their disbelief: a backward walk of 600 kilometres, but why? Back in 2024, together with Samuel and our dachshund Murphy, we created our first work, exploring the concept of existential courage and the fear of the unknown, which eventually gave birth to the film All Backwards: a work of walking the Camino de Santiago entirely backwards.

Now, a year after retro-walking into Santiago de Compostela, it still sounds ridiculous to many. Funnily enough, some of my close friends or family still don’t believe that we actually did what we did.

Nonetheless, the experience was indescribably beautiful. Each day of doing the work sowed a sense of gratitude and created a calm, denoised mind. Nevertheless, not every moment was filled with sunshine and roses. It was a confrontational journey that laid bare the necessity – and beauty – of letting go.

For those who aren’t familiar with the Camino Francés: the Camino Francés is the most popular route of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimages. Starting in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, near the French Pyrenees, and ending in Spain’s Santiago de Compostela, the Camino Francés is a breathtaking path and an unforgettable experience.

Now try to imagine the Camino’s scenic landscapes not coming towards you, but passing you by and moving away from you. Suffice to say, walking the Camino Francés “normally” already makes for a memorable impact in many different ways. But walking it backwards, literally, step by step, sheds an entirely new light on the act of letting go, one which I’d love to share with you here.

A new perspective on letting go (literally)

During the first days, the backward motion took some getting used to. It felt quite awkward, walking in reverse for hour after hour. I’d take every step carefully, each walk being both exciting and intense. I remember finishing my daily walks feeling exhausted. But not because of the walking per se, but because of the amount of energy spent on focusing solely on the feet, the senses, and on grappling with the fear of breaking a leg. 

But then, some days into the journey, the screaming mind started to quiet down. The backward motion required less attention, less energy, and made way for experiencing the actual situation: that of “walking away from the world”.

In those moments, the necessity of letting go became a very palpable thing: Because of the slower pace, the walk seemed to be endless, and fed into the illusion of the landscape being somewhat unchanging. But then you might walk past a vineyard, which you still see some 60 minutes later, and out of a sudden, it had disappeared into the horizon. Just like that.

Letting go as a vital ingredient for Existential Courage

It’s like how we happily take for granted that things will stay with us forever, while the opposite is true. You might even rejoice in this illusion, to look a loved one in the eye and hush away the fact that this, too, shall pass. That even a gaze that deep, that timelessly, will nonetheless be forgotten in time.

This makes walking backwards an honest, yet subtle and tangible reminder of the fragility of things, and the erosive nature of life. Nothing stays with us forever; everything is temporary: a main ingredient for developing the courage to face life’s impermanence.

If you haven’t noticed by now, walking backwards for an extensive amount of time can, as stupid as it may sound, actually become quite the experience. If you allow yourself to really see that image of the world pulling away from you, you quickly start to sense your own vulnerability. Hereby, you become aware of the paradox that you have to let go to experience something new.