Finding my way, finding my work–a 103-mile long journey

How reluctance turned into reassurance.

Image Credits - Pexels

We’re the most connected generation in history, and yet the most lonely. With the advent of liquid modernity, religion—a stubbornly non-liquid concept—is simultaneously losing its appeal, at least in the West, leaving us spiritually starved.

When I thought “pilgrimage,” I pictured a bunch of middle-aged people singing dull Catholic hymns and endlessly babbling the Rosary. Being Polish, the concept wasn’t unfamiliar—every August, a group of pilgrims en route to Jasna Góra, the spiritual heart of Poland would pass beneath my window, singing Barka and chanting about John Paul II. As you may gather from my tone, it didn’t exactly speak to my sensibilities.

A deal well struck

I didn’t set out to be a pilgrim. I was just desperate for a job. After more than a year of rejection emails, depression, and existential dread, I found myself praying—more out of emotional exhaustion than spiritual conviction. I’d heard in a podcast that God doesn’t mind the odd deal, so I struck one with Our Lady: if you help me land a job, I’ll go on a pilgrimage. It was half-plea, half-promise. But the more I read about the Pilgrim Cross, the more the journey began calling to me, job or no job. Funnily enough, she came through. The offer landed almost exactly a month before I was meant to start walking. By then, I knew I was going anyway.

However, self-doubt started crawling in before I even arrived. I sat in an Uber, making the reasonably short trip from northwest London to Epping, where we were setting off, and wondering what on earth I’d signed up for.

Walking the walk

Image Credits - Pexels

The first day was a blur of nerves, names and new faces. For a moment, I was convinced I didn’t belong. But once we started walking, something shifted. The awkwardness melted with the miles. Small talk gave way to real conversation. I stopped worrying about fitting in and just started being present, step by step. Slowly, the road stopped feeling like a challenge and started to feel more like an invitation.

The Pilgrim Cross is one of those traditions that feels ancient yet alive, passed hand to hand, group to group, across the country every year since 1948. The destination, Walsingham—a tiny village in Norfolk known as England’s Nazareth—has been a pilgrimage site since well before the Reformation. According to tradition, the Virgin Mary appeared in a vision and asked for a replica of her home in Nazareth to be built there.

I didn’t know much about it when I signed up—only that people walked for days carrying a massive wooden cross, singing, laughing, aching, crying. Something about the mix of intensity and vulnerability pulled me in. It didn’t feel like “religion” in the strict sense—it felt human. A shared movement toward something sacred, even if none of us could quite name what that was. Walking 20 miles in a day sounds tough, but manageable, like a fitness challenge or a long hike with friends.

Oh darling, it's a long walk!

What no one warns you about is doing it for six days straight: waking up at 6:30 a.m., half-asleep and sore, drinking instant coffee, walking through rain and blisters and the kind of exhaustion that makes brushing your teeth feel like a major event. It’s not just the distance—it’s the repetition. The relentlessness of showing up to your own body every morning, no matter how loudly it protests. Around day three, it stops feeling like a novelty and becomes a quiet endurance. A rhythm that strips everything back and leaves you face to face with yourself.

Strangers that become family

Image Credits - Author

What surprised me most wasn’t the walking—it was the people. There’s something disarming about being thrown together with strangers and instantly forming a temporary family. You eat together, walk together, and sleep on church hall floors together. You see each other with unwashed hair and blistered feet, sharing snacks and stories and silence. It didn’t matter where we came from or what denomination we belonged to (if any); the road made things simple. There was a deep, unspoken intimacy in someone offering you a plaster for your heel or making you tea when you couldn’t face standing up. I’m usually quick to make friends, but I, too, was shocked by the kind of closeness this experience fostered.

It was intimacy without performance, connection without pretence. We weren’t trying to impress one another. We were just walking each other home. There was one stretch where the distance between stops was, frankly, unwalkable, so we took a train—just one station. But in true pilgrimage fashion, even that wasn’t simple. We boarded the last carriage, only to realise that only the front four would stop at the next station. Which meant we had to walk through the entire train. Picture it: a bunch of dusty, dishevelled pilgrims hauling a giant wooden cross through carriage after carriage, murmuring apologies to confused commuters gripping Pret coffees.

Spirituality isn't loud

Image Credits - Author

Now that we had punctured the bubble of British reserve, carrying something visible and sacred to a space that’s usually silent and closed off, we weren’t preaching. We were just walking. Somehow, that felt like witnessing in a way I’d never experienced before. Not loud or dogmatic—just quietly present.

Walking through Cambridge was another moment that stuck. It was a sunny afternoon—students and tourists everywhere, heads down, earbuds in, surrounded by spires and £5 oat flat whites. I was at peace.

Earlier that week, one of my fellow pilgrims reflected on the power of being proud to be different—how rare it is to step into that discomfort and stay there, visibly, without shrinking. That reflection hit especially hard in Cambridge. Because for once, I wasn’t embarrassed. I was proud to be a pilgrim.

We hopped from one place to another. Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with a never-ending stream of place names, tea stops, churches, and village halls. Eventually, they started blurring into a rhythm anyway—a symphony of blisters, friendship, and unexpected warmth.

Humanity shines through

But what stayed with me were the people. Parishioners who greeted us with thermoses of tea and homemade cakes. Vicars from nearly-empty churches who lit up at the sight of muddy boots filling their pews.

In one village, a Buddhist man and his friend, neither Christian, treated us to the most incredible fruit spread I’ve ever seen: melons, grapes, apples, all carefully laid out like we were honoured guests. In a way, we were. Not because we were special, but because we showed up. And in return, people opened their doors and hearts with a generosity that felt quietly sacred.

It was in those small, unglamorous moments that something inside me began to shift. There was no sermon, no single epiphany—just a gentle sense that I was exactly where I needed to be. The warmth of strangers. The way someone always made you tea before you even asked. The quiet pride of a vicar unlocking a centuries-old church to welcome singing strangers. It wasn’t about belief systems—it was about presence. About showing up, physically and emotionally. About faith.

For someone who came on pilgrimage half out of desperation, half on a dare, I realised I wasn’t just walking to honour a promise. I was walking into something that had been waiting for me long before I knew how to ask for it. Coming home was strange. I thought I’d feel accomplished—maybe even a little smug. But what I felt was tender. Like something had been cracked open. The pace of the outside world suddenly felt too fast, too loud, too shallow.

I didn’t come back with answers. I didn’t become a better person. But I did return with a quiet clarity. A deeper trust in people. And a sense that meaning doesn’t always arrive through grand gestures. It often shows up in shared footsteps, open doors, and bowls of sliced apples offered by strangers.

An act of kindness

Fittingly, it all began—and ended—with a flip-flop. On the very first day, just moments after stepping into the church hall in Epping, I realised I’d somehow lost one. Not the most auspicious start for someone already doubting whether they belonged there. But before I could spiral, one of the support drivers offered to buy me a replacement without hesitation.

It was such a simple act, but it quietly affirmed something I’d keep learning over and over on the road: people show up for each other here.

Image Credits - Unsplash

When I got home ten days later, dusty and changed in ways I couldn't yet explain, there it was—the missing flip-flop—waiting patiently on my doormat. As if to say: even the bits of us that go missing along the way can find their way back. You just have to keep walking.

The pilgrimage didn’t give me what I thought I wanted. It gave me what I didn’t know I needed.

Also Read: Feeling like a modern-day Van Gogh?