Mountains and Me: Notes from Mountain Tops

When did you last experience real fear (fear for your life)? It’s strange how, as a society, we’re moving towards a reality where anxiety has become more common than any actual life-threatening danger. (I don’t mean to say that you should put your life at risk intentionally.)

We’re constantly bombarded by stress, often without even knowing what exactly we’re afraid of. The stress levels of an average adult are through the roof, with no clear solution in sight. But perhaps the answer lies somewhere simpler, somewhere raw and untouched.

For quite some time now, I’ve been traveling to the mountains. Every time, it cracks something deep within me; something I can’t quite explain. I’ve stopped looking for answers and instead accepted the experience itself. This year, during a trek where I camped for several days, I found myself in full contact with nature. Drinking from clear, icy streams, walking for hours on remote trails, and slowing down to the mountain’s natural rhythm felt like I was finally stepping back into a lost way of living. Surprisingly, this slow pace doesn’t unsettle me, instead, it awakens a calm excitement I rarely feel in daily life.

There’s something magical about the heights of these mountains. Each time I’m there, I feel an urge to fly, to dissolve into the peaks, as though I could somehow blend with the sky and the cliffs. The first time I felt the clouds touch my face, I cried. It felt like something sacred was reaching out to me, a known, familiar presence that brought humility. That touch felt almost spiritual, like being hugged by something beyond words.

Cruising through the mountains, I felt a different kind of high, a ‘suroor’ that reminded me of the blissful escape of listening to music. But here, the music was silence, and the beats came from within, from my heart, my lymph nodes, my very bones. My whole body seemed to groove with the energy of the mountains, and I realized that in this stillness, there was a harmony I rarely experience elsewhere. In those moments, every breath, every step felt timeless.

There’s also a simplicity in mountain life that I’ve come to cherish. The people who live in these remote areas carry a warmth and humility that feels rare these days. Every door that opened, every person I met, greeted me with kindness and openness that was overwhelming. It’s strange how a life so sparse can feel so full, so complete.

But then there’s the reality of the terrain, the challenging paths, the steep trails where one wrong step could mean a fall into the valley below. I can’t deny that there were moments on the trek when I felt real fear for my life. But in those moments, something clicked.

When true fear kicks in, it has a way of making all the small worries seem irrelevant, a reminder of what’s real and what’s not. I’ve realized that without confronting real fears once in a while, our minds begin to invent things to fear; problems that don’t exist, worries that only consume us.

Coming down from the mountains, I felt like I left a part of myself there; an anchor that calls me back every time life becomes overwhelming. The mountains taught me that peace isn’t something (someone) we find in places of comfort. True peace lies in places (people) that strip us down, that challenge us, that ask us to confront our own smallness.

And maybe that’s why I keep going back. Each visit reminds me that life’s answers don’t lie in what we seek but in the journey itself, in the quiet spaces between fear and awe, where the world feels vast, and we feel both lost and found.