I stood at the base of the Dachstein yesterday morning, watching mist curl around its limestone face. A jogger passed me, checking her smartwatch. A car horn echoed from the valley. Someone's phone rang with an aggressive electronic melody.
The mountain didn't notice any of it.
It's been standing there for roughly 200 million years. The Roman legions marched past its slopes. Medieval salt traders cursed its steep passes. Nazi officers gazed up at its peaks during the war. And now tourists take selfies at its base, their images disappearing into cloud servers before they've even walked away.
What does it mean to be present when everything around you is screaming for your attention? When your life moves at the speed of notifications, but the things that matter most—the things that last—move at the speed of stone?
The Mountain Doesn't Check Its Phone
There's something almost offensive about how still mountains are. We've built an entire civilization around the idea that stillness equals stagnation. Move fast and break things. Hustle culture. Growth at all costs. The Dachstein has never grown a single meter in my lifetime, and it doesn't seem bothered by this fact.
I think about this when I'm hiking the trails around Hallstatt. The same paths that Bronze Age miners walked 3,000 years ago. They were probably worried about their daily concerns—would there be enough salt to trade, would their children survive the winter, would the chieftain demand more tribute. All of those worries have dissolved into nothing. The people are dust. Their houses are archaeological sites. Their names are forgotten.
But the mountain remembers in its own way.
Not through conscious memory, of course. Through layers. Through the way water has carved certain channels over millennia. Through the trees that grow in specific patterns where ancient rockslides created pockets of soil. The mountain holds history in its body, not its mind.
What We've Lost in the Rush
My grandmother used to tell me about sitting by her window in the 1950s, watching the seasons change on the Traunstein. She didn't have a television until she was forty. No internet, obviously. No smartphone buzzing with updates about things happening on the other side of the world that she couldn't affect anyway.
She just watched the mountain.
This sounds impossibly boring to us now. But she could tell you exactly when the first snow would stick at the summit each year. She knew which week the alpine roses would bloom. She understood the mountain's rhythms in a way that's nearly extinct now. Not because we're less intelligent, but because we're less present.
We've traded depth for breadth. We know a little about everything happening everywhere, but we don't really know anything about what's happening right here. Right now. In this specific place where our bodies actually exist.
The Archaeology of Attention
Here's what archaeologists have found in the Salzkammergut region: evidence of human habitation going back 7,000 years. That's 7,000 years of people looking at these same mountains. Celts, Romans, Bavarians, Austrians. Different languages, different gods, different political systems. The mountains outlasted all of it.
But every single one of those people, in their own time, thought their moment was the most important one. The Celts thought their bronze weapons were the height of technology. The Romans believed their empire would last forever. The medieval salt miners assumed their trade routes would never change. They were all wrong.
What makes us think we're any different?
We act as if the present moment—our present moment—is uniquely significant. As if the emails we're answering and the meetings we're attending and the social media posts we're crafting will matter in 100 years. They won't. None of it will. The mountain will still be here, and everything we're so anxious about right now will have evaporated like morning mist.
The Paradox of Presence
But here's the strange part: understanding that nothing matters in the long term doesn't make the present moment less important. It makes it more important. Because if this moment is all we really have—if everything else is either memory or imagination—then being truly present is the only thing that actually matters.
The mountain teaches this without trying to teach anything. It's just there. Solid. Undeniable. Present in the most literal sense possible.
When I'm hiking alone in the early morning, before the tour buses arrive, I sometimes stop and just stand still for ten minutes. No phone. No music. No thinking about what I need to do later. Just standing there, being present with the mountain being present.
It's harder than it sounds.
Your mind wants to wander. You start thinking about work. About that conversation you had yesterday. About what you'll make for dinner. Your body starts to itch and fidget. We're so unused to simply being that it feels almost painful at first.
Centuries in a Single Breath
There's a spot above Obertraun where you can see layers of rock exposed in a cliff face. Each layer represents millions of years. The limestone was formed from ancient sea creatures dying and settling on the ocean floor. Then tectonic forces pushed it up into mountains. Then ice ages carved valleys through it. Then humans showed up and started making trails.
All of that history is visible in a single view.
When you stand there, you can feel how thin your own timeline is. Your entire life—from birth to death—won't even register as a fraction of a layer. You're less than a pixel in the mountain's photograph. Less than a frame in its movie.
This could be depressing. It should be depressing, according to our modern way of thinking. If nothing we do matters on that scale, why bother doing anything?
But it's not depressing. It's freeing.
The Gift of Insignificance
When you accept that you're insignificant on the geological timescale, you stop worrying about being significant on the human timescale. You stop performing for some imaginary audience. You stop crafting your life to look impressive to people who won't remember you in fifty years anyway.
You just live.
The mountain has never tried to be impressive. It doesn't need to. It simply is. And in being exactly what it is, without apology or embellishment, it becomes magnificent.
Maybe that's the real lesson here. Not that we should be more like mountains—we can't be, we're human—but that we should stop trying to be something other than what we are. Stop rushing toward some imagined future where we'll finally be enough. Stop performing presence while actually being absent.
The Practice of Standing Still
So how do you actually do this? How do you become more present in a world designed to fragment your attention into a thousand pieces?
I don't have a perfect answer. I'm not some enlightened guru who's figured it all out. I'm just someone who spends a lot of time looking at mountains and thinking about what they might teach us.
But here's what I've noticed works:
Find Your Mountain
You don't need an actual mountain. You need something permanent, something that doesn't change with human whims. A particular tree you pass every day. A rock formation. A view from a specific window. Something that was there before you and will be there after you.
Visit it regularly. Not to do anything. Just to acknowledge that it exists. To measure yourself against something that operates on a different timescale than your anxious thoughts.
Practice Stillness Without Purpose
We're so conditioned to make everything productive. Meditation apps promise better focus. Mindfulness training claims to reduce stress and improve performance. Even our attempts at presence become another form of optimization.
Try standing still without any goal. Don't time it. Don't track it. Don't turn it into content. Just stand there and notice what happens when you're not trying to get anywhere or become anyone.
The mountain doesn't meditate to become a better mountain. It just stands there. Sometimes that's enough.
Count in Centuries, Not Seconds
When you're worried about something, ask yourself: will this matter in 100 years? In 1,000 years? In 200 million years?
Most things won't. And that's okay. That's actually beautiful. It means you're free to focus on what matters right now, in this moment, without the weight of imagined eternal significance crushing you.
What the Mountain Witnesses
The Dachstein has witnessed everything. Wars and weddings. Births and deaths. The first human to climb its peaks. The last mammoth to walk its valleys. The construction of the salt mines that made this region wealthy. The tourists who now flood in every summer with their cameras and their schedules.
It witnessed all of it with the same indifference.
Not the indifference of not caring, but the indifference of perfect acceptance. The mountain doesn't judge. It doesn't prefer summer over winter, or peace over war. It simply stands and allows everything to happen around it, through it, because of it.
We could learn something from that kind of presence. The kind that doesn't need to control or fix or improve. The kind that simply witnesses without needing to change what it sees.
Being the Witness
There's a meditation practice where you observe your thoughts without engaging with them. You become the witness rather than the participant. Thoughts arise and pass away, and you just watch them like clouds moving across the sky.
The mountain does this naturally. Clouds move across its face. Seasons change its appearance. Humans come and go. And it remains, witnessing without attachment.
When I'm hiking and I catch myself spiraling into anxiety about something, I try to shift into witness mode. Not to stop the anxiety—that usually makes it worse—but to observe it the way the mountain observes weather. It's happening. It will pass. The mountain remains.
The Permanence We Can Touch
Here's what I keep coming back to: in a world where everything is temporary, where careers evaporate overnight and relationships end and even our photos are stored on servers that might not exist in twenty years, there's something profound about touching stone that's been here for millions of years.
It grounds you. Literally and figuratively.
Last week I put my hand on the limestone face of the Traunstein and thought about all the other hands that have touched this same spot. Medieval miners. Victorian explorers. Modern climbers. My grandmother, probably, on one of her walks decades ago. All of those hands are gone now. The stone remains.
But in that moment, we were all present. Past and future collapsed into a single point of contact between human skin and ancient rock. That's as close to eternity as we get.
The mountain doesn't teach by speaking. It teaches by standing still while centuries rush past. It teaches by being exactly what it is, without apology or explanation. It teaches by remaining when everything else has gone.
Coming Home to Now
Every time I walk these trails, I'm walking through layers of time. The path itself was probably established by animals first, then used by humans for thousands of years. The trees along the trail are younger than my grandmother but older than me. The rocks beneath my feet predate human consciousness itself.
All of it exists right now. Right here. In this present moment that's somehow connected to every other moment that's ever happened in this place.
That's what presence really means, I think. Not living in the moment as if the past and future don't exist, but understanding that the past and future only exist in this moment. Right now. The mountain understands this without thinking about it.
We have to think about it because we're cursed with consciousness. We're aware of time passing, aware of our own mortality, aware that everything changes. The mountain just is.
But maybe that awareness—that curse—is also a gift. Because we can choose presence in a way the mountain can't. We can decide to stop rushing, to stand still, to witness our own lives as they're actually happening instead of constantly planning for some future that never quite arrives.
The Practice Continues
I won't pretend I've mastered this. Most days I'm still checking my phone too much, worrying about things that won't matter next week, rushing through the present moment to get to something else.
But the mountain is patient. It's been here for 200 million years. It can wait for me to figure it out.
And when I do manage to stand still—really still, not just physically but mentally—there's a quality of peace that's hard to describe. It's not the peace of having solved all your problems. It's the peace of realizing that the problems exist in time, but you exist in presence. And presence is always here, always available, always solid beneath your feet like stone.
The centuries rush past. They always have. They always will. Empires rise and fall. Technologies emerge and become obsolete. Languages evolve and die. But the mountain stands. And in standing, it reminds us that we can stand too. That we can be present even as everything around us changes.
That's the gift. Not immortality. Not permanence. Just this moment, right now, as solid and real as limestone beneath your hand.
Tomorrow I'll probably forget this. I'll get caught up in the rush again, checking my phone, worrying about deadlines, living anywhere but here. But then I'll look up and see the mountain through my window, and I'll remember: it's still there. It's always been there. And it's teaching the same lesson it's been teaching for millions of years.
Stand still. Be present. Let the centuries rush past. You don't need to rush with them.