A year from today, on October 1, 2027, a small group of people will stand together on a cool October morning in Ponte de Lima, Portugal, and take their first steps on the Camino de Santiago with me. I can already see it. It will be early and brisk, and some of them will be drinking coffee. They'll be standing together, but not really together. They arrived in Portugal the day before and met each other that night. The talk will be small, the polite kind you make with strangers

I went through four pairs of shoes before I walked the Camino, and my best friend Phil walked the whole thing in a pair of old slip-on Sketchers. Neither of us got a single blister. I've had a year to sit with that, and I still can't decide what it means. I'm going back next October, and I'm already deep in it again. Topos or Altras? How much cushion is too much cushion? Whether to bring sandals for the rain? Which pack? A year out, and I have browser tabs open. Here's how th

Years ago in college, my roommate played drums in a lounge band and couldn't make a gig. He asked me to cover it, and there was no time to rehearse with the other two guys in the trio, so I showed up the night of and played. I knew some of the songs, since they were lounge and jazz and light rock standards. There were plenty I didn't know at all, and for those I had to listen carefully to the bass player and the guitarist for tempo, style, and dynamics. There's always some am

In my third blog post, “The Higher I Climbed, the Less I Knew Myself,” I left you where I was that evening at the leadership academy, asked about a list of passions I couldn’t provide. I promised that wasn’t where the story ended. It isn’t. But the way back wasn’t what I expected, and it wasn’t a straight line. The first thing that brought me back to myself wasn’t the Camino at all. It was a field study in Vienna. By the end of that leadership academy, something had already s

If you read “The Higher I Climbed, the Less I Knew Myself,” you know what 26 years of leadership cost me. Title by title, I traded the people who knew me for the people who only knew my position. By the end, I was the new dean, the latest associate provost, known by my CV before anyone had a chance to know me. The Camino gave that back to me, and it did it through something almost absurdly simple: nobody knew my title. For the first time in decades, I was just Rob. Not Rob th

“It’ll look good on your resume.” Someone planted that sentence in me back in high school, and it took. For decades it ran quietly underneath my decisions, and it worked. A great deal of what I’m proud of got done with those six words humming in the background. What no one warns you about is the slow cost of living by them. The higher I climbed, the more I became my CV. We like these stories to turn on a single dramatic moment. The day you walked out. The meeting that broke s

My daughter asked me a good question the other night, and I fumbled the answer. Not because I didn't know how to answer her, but because I couldn't find the right words, ones that seemed weighty enough to convey what I was thinking and feeling. She has watched Ultreia take shape, and she’s glad I’ve found this thing to build. But she was puzzled by one part of it, and she said so. "Aren't there other trails, other places you could go that would be just as good? What's so spec

It started with a Hallmark movie. It was a March evening, not long before my sabbatical was set to begin. I had been waiting on that first real break in my career, anxious for the reset but with no idea how I was going to use it. I didn't want to spend it sitting around doing nothing, and I knew that prepping for the spring semester I'd return to faculty for wasn't going to fill the hours. So there I was on the couch, a little restless, watching a movie about a woman who had