The last few posts on pilgrimage have attempted to lay out some of my thoughts on the process of a geographical pilgrimage through six stages: Preparing, Leaving, Travelling, Arriving, Returning and Remembering.

I have been giving some thought to the way in which the stages of a geographical pilgrimage can inform the idea of “life as pilgrimage”. Clearly life is not such a simple, linear process as a geographical pilgrimage; it may be more accurate to speak about the cycle of life as pilgrimage. On a previous post (INTERLUDE–Pilgrimage as the stages of human life) I tried to tie in pilgrimage stages to a straightforward human life cycle from Childhood through to Old age, but here I want to rather look at some of the processes that we all go through during our lives and that make us who we are.

I’ve set the stages out as a diagram as I have before, with an opportunity to compare geographical pilgrimage stages with the process of “life as pilgrimage”.

Future posts will examine this relationship in more detail.