I sat in my apartment last Tuesday, spreadsheet open, color-coding my next five years. Career milestones in blue. Financial goals in green. Personal development in yellow. By 2029, according to my carefully calculated projections, I'd have achieved exactly what I wanted.
Then I looked out my window at the Dachstein massif.
Those peaks have stood there for roughly 200 million years. They've watched empires rise and collapse. They've seen the Romans march through these valleys, medieval traders navigate the salt routes, and two world wars reshape the boundaries drawn on maps below. And they're still here, though not quite the same. Because while I was planning my next half-decade down to the quarter, those mountains were doing what they've always done: slowly, imperceptibly, changing.
Erosion doesn't care about my timeline.
The Mathematics of Mountain Time
The Alps grow approximately 1-2 millimeters per year due to tectonic activity. They also erode at roughly the same rate. This balance has persisted for millions of years, a dance between uplift and wearing away that makes our human planning horizons look almost comical in their brevity.
I did the math once, because that's the kind of thing you do when you're supposed to be working on quarterly projections. At the current erosion rate, the Dachstein loses about 0.1 millimeters of height per year from its peak. That's roughly the thickness of a human hair. In my lifetime—let's say 80 years if I'm lucky—that mountain will lose about 8 millimeters. Less than the length of my thumbnail.
But here's what struck me: that process never stops. It doesn't pause for reconsideration. It doesn't have backup plans or contingency strategies.
When water seeps into a crack in limestone and freezes, expanding by 9% and splitting the rock, that's not a deviation from the plan. That is the plan. The only plan. The mountain doesn't resist this process or try to optimize it. It simply continues, shaped by forces much larger than itself.
What My Spreadsheet Couldn't Account For
My five-year plan assumed stability. It assumed that the person I am now would want the same things as the person I'll be in 2029. It assumed that the industry I work in would follow predictable patterns, that my relationships would evolve according to reasonable expectations, that my health would cooperate with my ambitions.
The mountains taught me something different.
In 1920, a climber named Paul Preuss fell to his death on the Mandlkogel, not far from where I'm writing this. He was 27 years old, at the peak of his abilities, and had revolutionized alpine climbing with his philosophy of free soloing. His five-year plan probably didn't include dying on a relatively simple descent in good weather. The mountains that witnessed his final moments are still here. His plans aren't.
I'm not trying to be morbid. I'm trying to be honest about scale.
The Illusion of Control
We build our plans like we're constructing monuments. We want them to last, to mean something, to prove that we're steering our lives with intention and wisdom. There's nothing wrong with this impulse. Planning gives us direction, helps us make decisions, provides a framework for evaluating opportunities.
But watch what happens to granite over geological time.
The feldspar crystals that give granite its characteristic pink color? They break down into clay minerals through a process called hydrolysis. The quartz remains, more resistant, but even it eventually succumbs. What was once solid rock becomes sediment, then soil, then perhaps part of a tree, then decomposed organic matter, then potentially incorporated into new rock through metamorphic processes.
Nothing stays what it was. Not even stone.
The Day My Plan Dissolved
Three years ago, I had everything mapped out. I was going to make senior manager by 30, buy a house by 32, maybe start thinking about a family by 35. The timeline was clear, the steps were logical, and I felt good about my trajectory.
Then my company restructured. My position was eliminated. The housing market in the Salzkammergut went completely insane—properties I'd been watching doubled in price within 18 months. And the relationship I thought was heading toward marriage ended over a conversation about whether we actually wanted the same life or just thought we should.
I felt like a failure. Like I'd somehow miscalculated, planned poorly, missed obvious warning signs.
But standing on the Krippenstein plateau one morning, looking down at Hallstatt—a village that's been continuously inhabited for over 7,000 years—I realized something. Those ancient residents didn't have five-year plans. They had seasons. They had patterns. They had the knowledge that winter would come, that the lake would freeze, that spring would return, that the mountains would still be there.
They understood erosion in a way I'd forgotten.
What Mountains Know About Change
There's a hiking trail above Gosau that passes by a massive boulder split perfectly in two. The crack runs straight through the middle, clean as a knife cut. A sign explains that this happened during the last ice age, when a glacier carried the rock here and then retreated, leaving it exposed to centuries of freeze-thaw cycles.
The boulder didn't resist its splitting. It couldn't.
But here's what interests me: both halves are still there. They've become landmarks, reference points, parts of the trail system. They've been incorporated into the geography. What looked like destruction from one perspective became transformation from another.
The Geology of Personal Change
Geologists classify erosion into several types: physical, chemical, and biological. Each works differently, but all share a common characteristic—they're processes, not events. They don't happen suddenly (except in dramatic cases like landslides). They happen continuously, often invisibly, accumulating effects over time.
My life erodes the same way.
Physical erosion: the daily wear of routine, the small compromises, the gradual shift in priorities that comes from actually living rather than just planning to live. I used to think I'd never become someone who cared about garden design or spent Sunday mornings at farmers markets. Yet here I am, discussing heirloom tomato varieties with a 70-year-old Austrian woman who grows them in her greenhouse.
Chemical erosion: the way experiences dissolve old certainties. Travel changes how you see home. Loss changes how you value presence. Success in one area often reveals the emptiness of another. These aren't failures of planning—they're the natural result of exposure to life's elements.
Biological erosion: the people who enter and leave our lives, each one leaving traces, changing the composition of who we are. Roots that crack through our carefully laid foundations. Seeds that take hold in unexpected places.
Planning vs. Responding
I still make plans. I'm not advocating for some kind of radical acceptance where we just drift through life hoping things work out. The mountains themselves prove that structure matters—the Dachstein's limestone layers, deposited over millions of years in ancient seas, give it the strength to stand against erosion for eons yet to come.
But I plan differently now.
Instead of a five-year plan, I think in terms of direction and response. Where do I want to be oriented? What matters to me right now, in this season of life? And when the inevitable erosion happens—when jobs disappear, relationships end, health fails, opportunities close—how can I respond in ways that honor both the reality of change and my deeper values?
The Practice of Geological Thinking
Here's what I've learned from watching mountains:
- Erosion isn't the enemy. It's the process by which rough edges smooth, weak points reveal themselves, and new formations become possible. The most beautiful features of alpine geography—cirques, arêtes, horns—are all products of erosion.
- Resistance is expensive. The harder the rock, the longer it lasts, but even granite eventually yields. Flexibility often serves better than rigidity. The willows by the Traun River survive floods that topple rigid pines.
- Scale matters. What feels catastrophic at human timescales might be routine adjustment at geological ones. The Dachstein has survived ice ages. I can probably survive a career change.
- Presence compounds. Mountains don't plan to be here in a million years. They simply continue being mountains, day after day, responding to immediate conditions. That persistence, not planning, is what creates permanence.
The mountain doesn't achieve its height through ambition. It achieves it through presence, through the simple fact of continuing to exist while forces shape it into what it becomes.
My Current Non-Plan
I keep a notebook now instead of a spreadsheet. In it, I write observations rather than projections. Things I notice about how I'm changing, what I'm drawn to, what feels true in this particular moment. I review it monthly, looking for patterns the way a geologist reads strata.
Some things I've noticed:
I care less about achievement and more about attention. The quality of how I spend my days matters more than what I accomplish in them. This wasn't in my five-year plan, but it's emerged through the steady erosion of my younger ambitions.
I'm more interested in depth than breadth. I used to want to experience everything, go everywhere, meet everyone. Now I want to know a few places deeply, to watch them through seasons, to see how they change and how I change in relation to them.
I've stopped trying to prevent erosion and started paying attention to what it reveals.
What Remains
The Hallstatt salt mines have been in operation for over 7,000 years. That's not because someone in 5000 BCE created a seven-millennia business plan. It's because people kept showing up, kept responding to conditions, kept adapting their methods while maintaining their purpose.
The salt was there. The need for salt continued. The methods changed—from primitive tools to bronze to iron to modern machinery. The ownership changed. The politics changed. The languages changed. But the fundamental relationship between humans and that mountain, between need and resource, persisted.
That's what I want from my life now. Not a detailed map of the next five years, but a clear sense of what I'm oriented toward. Not a rigid plan that breaks under pressure, but a flexible response to conditions that maintains direction.
The mountains will still be here when my plans fail. They'll be here when I succeed too. They'll be here regardless, really, which is both humbling and comforting. My five-year plan matters to me, and that's enough. It doesn't have to matter to the universe.
The View from Here
I still open that spreadsheet sometimes. It makes me smile now rather than stress. All those carefully color-coded cells, those formulas calculating compound interest on investments, those milestone markers spaced out like trail signs on a well-maintained path.
It wasn't a waste of time to make it. Planning is how we think through possibilities, how we clarify values, how we make today's decisions with tomorrow in mind. But treating it as prophecy rather than hypothesis—that's where I went wrong.
The mountains have taught me to hold my plans lightly. To make them, yes, but to remember that erosion is always at work. That the person I'm becoming is being shaped by forces I can't entirely control or predict. That this isn't failure—it's geology.
What remains after erosion isn't less than what was there before. It's what was strong enough, flexible enough, or fortunate enough to persist. And sometimes what remains is more beautiful for having been shaped by time and pressure and the patient work of water and ice.
Moving Forward (Which Is Really Just Staying Present)
So where does this leave me? Without a five-year plan, how do I make decisions? How do I know if I'm on track?
I ask different questions now:
- Does this choice align with what matters to me right now?
- Am I responding to actual conditions or to what I imagined conditions would be?
- What's being revealed as this situation erodes my expectations?
- Can I be present with what is, rather than anxious about what should be?
These aren't easier questions than "Am I on track for my five-year goals?" In some ways, they're harder. They require more honesty, more flexibility, more willingness to admit when I'm wrong or when circumstances have changed.
But they're questions the mountains can help me answer. Because when I'm unsure, when I'm anxious, when I'm trying to force outcomes through sheer willpower, I can walk up to the Krippenstein or around the Gosausee and remember: erosion matters more than my plans.
Not because my plans don't matter at all. But because erosion is always happening, always revealing, always shaping. Fighting it is exhausting. Working with it—understanding it, respecting it, even appreciating it—that's where I've found something more durable than any timeline I could construct.
The Dachstein will outlast every plan I make. Every goal I achieve or fail to achieve. Every version of myself that emerges and then erodes away. And somehow, that fact doesn't diminish my life. It clarifies it.
What matters isn't whether I stick to my five-year plan. What matters is whether I'm present for the erosion, attentive to what it's revealing, responsive to what it's creating. The mountains have been here for 200 million years not because they planned to be, but because they showed up, day after day, and let the forces of the world shape them into something that could last.
Maybe that's enough of a plan: show up, pay attention, respond honestly, and trust that what remains after the erosion will be what was meant to stay.
The rest is just weather and time, doing what they've always done.