I was twenty-three when I first stood at the base of the Dachstein, staring up at limestone walls that have been here for 200 million years. My head was full of five-year plans and career trajectories. The mountain didn't care.
That indifference taught me something my ambition never could.
We spend so much time chasing the next milestone, the next achievement, the next version of ourselves we think we should become. But what if the things that don't move—the things that simply exist—have more to teach us than all our striving combined? The Salzkammergut mountains have watched empires rise and collapse. They've seen the Celts, the Romans, the Habsburgs come and go. They're still here.
And they're not trying to be anything else.
What Mountains Know That We've Forgotten
There's a specific moment I think about often. It was 1809, and Tyrolean rebels fought Napoleon's forces in these valleys. Men died for causes they believed would change everything. The mountains absorbed their blood into the soil and kept standing. By 1810, the battles were over. The mountains remained exactly as they were.
This isn't a lesson in futility. It's something else entirely.
The Hoher Dachstein stands at 2,995 meters. It's been that height for thousands of years. It doesn't wake up trying to be 3,000 meters. It doesn't compare itself to the Matterhorn or feel inadequate next to Mont Blanc. It simply is what it is, doing what it does—existing, weathering, witnessing.
When did we decide that being wasn't enough? That we had to constantly become?
I've lived in the shadow of these mountains for three years now, and I've watched tourists come through Hallstatt by the thousands. They stay for two hours, take their photos, and leave. They're chasing the next destination, the next experience, the next Instagram story. The mountains watch them come and go like waves on a shore.
The tourists aren't wrong for moving. But the mountains aren't wrong for staying.
The Geology of Patience
Consider how mountains form. The Alps began rising about 30 million years ago when the African and Eurasian tectonic plates collided. Thirty million years. That's not a timeline that fits into a quarterly review or a vision board.
The Dachstein limestone formed in a shallow tropical sea during the Triassic period. Layer upon layer of calcium carbonate, compressed over millennia into rock. No shortcuts. No growth hacks. Just time and pressure and the slow accumulation of small things into something massive.
We know this intellectually, but we don't feel it. We can't. Our lives are too short, our attention spans too fractured. We want results in weeks, months, maybe a year if we're being patient. But some things can't be rushed.
Some things shouldn't be.
The Tyranny of Constant Becoming
I used to wake up every morning with a list. Not just tasks—a list of ways I needed to improve. Be more productive. Read more books. Learn another language. Network better. Optimize my sleep. Track my habits. Measure my progress.
The mountains taught me that this is exhausting.
There's a hiking trail near Obertraun that winds up toward the Krippenstein. It's been there for over a century. Generations of farmers used it to move their cattle to summer pastures. It doesn't try to be a better trail each year. It doesn't rebrand itself or seek to disrupt the hiking industry. It's worn smooth by thousands of feet, marked by cairns, reliable.
That reliability—that sameness—is its value.
What if we applied this thinking to ourselves? Not in a stagnant way, but in a way that honors what we already are. The shape we've already taken. The path we've already worn smooth through repetition and care.
Ambition tells us we're never enough. That there's always another peak to summit, another goal to achieve, another version of ourselves waiting to be unlocked. It's relentless. And yes, sometimes it's necessary. But it's not the only way to live.
When Striving Becomes Suffering
I know someone who moved to Vienna to "make it" in the tech world. He worked 80-hour weeks for three years, chasing funding rounds and user growth metrics. His startup failed. He came back to Salzburg broken, convinced he'd wasted his twenties.
He started working at a small carpentry shop in Bad Ischl. Makes furniture now. Same shop his grandfather worked in. He's been doing it for five years, and he's happier than I've ever seen him.
The work hasn't changed much. He's not trying to scale it or turn it into an empire. He makes tables and chairs that will last for generations. Like the mountains, his work is about presence, not progress.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't have goals. But maybe we need to distinguish between goals that serve our growth and goals that serve our anxiety. Between ambitions that align with who we are and ambitions we've adopted because we think we should want them.
The mountains don't apologize for being mountains. They don't wish they were oceans or forests. They accept their nature and express it fully.
Learning to Stand Still
There's a practice I've developed over the past year. Once a week, I hike to a specific spot on the Katrin mountain. Same spot every time. I sit on the same boulder and look at the same view for an hour.
Nothing happens.
That's the point.
The first few times, my mind raced. I thought about all the things I could be doing instead. Emails to answer. Articles to write. Skills to learn. But I kept sitting. Week after week. Same boulder. Same view. Same hour.
After about two months, something shifted. I started noticing things I'd missed before. The way light changes on the Traunstein throughout the hour. How the wind sounds different depending on the season. The specific birds that nest in the cliff face below me.
The mountain hadn't changed. I had. By staying still, I'd learned to see.
What Permanence Teaches
When you spend time with things that don't change, you develop different skills. Patience, obviously. But also discernment. You learn to notice subtle variations within apparent sameness. You understand that stability isn't the same as stagnation.
The Dachstein looks the same every morning, but it's not. Snow accumulates and melts. Rock faces shift imperceptibly. Ice forms in crevices and expands, slowly reshaping stone. The mountain is always changing, just on a timescale we can't perceive.
Maybe we're the same way. Maybe the changes that matter most in us happen slowly, beneath the surface, invisible to anyone checking our LinkedIn profile or Instagram feed.
I think about the salt miners who worked in Hallstatt for over 3,000 years. Generation after generation, descending into the same mountain, extracting the same resource. Their ambitions weren't about disruption or growth. They were about continuation. About maintaining something valuable. About being part of something larger and longer than themselves.
There's dignity in that. A kind of wisdom we've lost in our obsession with innovation and change.
The Long View
From the summit of the Krippenstein, you can see across the entire Salzkammergut. Lakes that have been here for 10,000 years. Forests that have regrown after countless fires. Villages that have stood for centuries.
Up there, your problems look different. That career setback? The mountain has seen thousands of careers come and go. That relationship that ended? The mountain has witnessed millions of loves and losses. That dream you're chasing? The mountain will be here long after you've either achieved it or forgotten it.
This perspective doesn't make your life meaningless. It makes it precious.
Because you're not here forever. You don't have the luxury of geological time. Your seasons are numbered. So maybe the question isn't "What can I achieve?" but "What's worth staying present for?"
Ambition Without Anxiety
I'm not arguing against ambition. I still have goals. I still want to create things, improve at my craft, contribute something meaningful. But I'm learning to hold these ambitions differently.
The mountains have ambition too, in a sense. They're constantly pushing upward, resisting erosion, maintaining their form against wind and water and time. But they're not anxious about it. They don't lie awake at night worrying about whether they're tall enough or impressive enough or living up to their potential.
They just do what mountains do. Slowly. Persistently. Without drama.
What if we approached our ambitions the same way? Working toward our goals with steady effort, but without the constant self-judgment and comparison. Building something solid that will last, rather than chasing metrics that change with every algorithm update.
There's a chapel near Bad Goisern that was built in 1450. It's been renovated over the centuries, but it's fundamentally the same building. For 574 years, it's served the same purpose. That's ambition. Just measured in centuries instead of quarters.
Witnessing Instead of Performing
The mountains have witnessed everything that's happened in these valleys. Wars and weddings. Harvests and famines. The rise of tourism and the decline of traditional ways of life. They don't judge. They don't intervene. They simply stand and watch.
There's something profound about being a witness rather than always being a performer.
We're so focused on doing, on achieving, on making our mark. But what if sometimes the most important thing we can do is simply be present? To witness our own lives without constantly trying to optimize them. To watch the people we love without trying to fix them. To experience our days without turning them into content or lessons or stepping stones to something else.
I've started keeping a journal that's just observations. Not goals or plans or reflections on personal growth. Just what I noticed. The color of the sky. The sound of cowbells in the distance. The way my coffee tasted. The expression on my neighbor's face.
It's boring. That's why it's valuable.
Because in that boredom, in that simple witnessing, I'm practicing the same skill the mountains have perfected. I'm learning to be here, fully, without needing it to be different or better or more.
The Practice of Presence
Here's what I've learned from three years of living among these ancient peaks:
- You don't need to have an opinion about everything
- You don't need to optimize every moment
- You don't need to turn every experience into a lesson
- You don't need to be constantly evolving
- You don't need to justify your existence through productivity
Sometimes you can just stand there. Like a mountain. Solid. Present. Enough.
This doesn't mean abandoning your dreams or settling for mediocrity. It means grounding your ambitions in something more stable than anxiety and comparison. It means building slowly, with intention, for the long term.
The Dachstein will be here in 100 years. Will what you're building? Will it matter? Will it have added something real to the world, or will it have been just noise, just motion, just the frantic energy of someone who couldn't sit still?
Coming Home to Yourself
There's a German word, "Heimat," that doesn't translate cleanly to English. It means home, but deeper. It's the place where you belong, where your roots go deep, where you know the land and it knows you.
The mountains are my Heimat now. Not because I was born here—I wasn't. But because I've stayed. Because I've let them teach me. Because I've stopped running long enough to put down roots.
And here's what I've discovered: you can have Heimat within yourself too. You can come home to who you actually are, rather than constantly chasing who you think you should be. You can settle into your own nature the way a mountain settles into its bedrock.
This isn't resignation. It's recognition.
You are already whole. Already enough. Already exactly what you need to be in this moment. Yes, you'll grow and change. Yes, you'll face challenges and develop new capacities. But that growth doesn't need to be driven by a sense of lack. It can be driven by curiosity, by love, by the simple desire to express more fully what's already there.
The mountains don't grow taller by hating their current height. They grow through the slow, patient accumulation of pressure and time. Through processes so gradual they're invisible to the naked eye. Through being what they are, completely, without apology.
Maybe that's the real lesson. Not that we should stop having ambitions, but that we should let those ambitions arise from presence rather than lack. From who we are rather than who we're not. From the solid ground beneath our feet rather than the anxious thoughts in our heads.
Standing Witness to Your Own Life
So here's what I do now, on those weekly visits to my boulder on the Katrin. I sit. I watch. I breathe. And I practice being as present as the mountain I'm sitting on.
I notice what's here without trying to change it. I feel what I feel without needing it to be different. I think what I think without turning it into a problem to solve.
And slowly, week by week, I'm learning what the mountains have always known: that being is enough. That presence is its own achievement. That you don't need to be anything other than what you are, right here, right now.
This doesn't mean I've stopped wanting things or working toward goals. But I hold them differently now. Lighter. With less attachment to outcomes and more appreciation for the process. With less anxiety about the future and more gratitude for the present.
The mountains will be here tomorrow. They were here yesterday. They're here now. And in their permanence, they teach us something our ambition never could: that the deepest satisfaction comes not from constantly becoming, but from fully being.
From showing up. From staying. From witnessing. From standing solid in the face of everything that changes.
From being here, completely, for as long as we're given.
That's what permanence teaches. That's what the mountains know. And if we're willing to be still long enough to listen, that's what they'll teach us too.