I stopped wearing a watch three years ago. Not because I wanted to make some grand statement about time or productivity, but because I realized I was measuring the wrong thing.
The Dachstein glacier moves about 20 meters per year. That's roughly 5.5 centimeters per day, or 0.23 centimeters per hour. You can't see it happening. You could stand there for an entire afternoon, eyes fixed on the ice, and witness nothing. Yet it moves.
My phone tells me it's 3:47 PM. The number means I should be somewhere, doing something, checking something off a list. But when I look up at the Hoher Dachstein, that number dissolves into irrelevance. The mountain doesn't care that it's 3:47. It doesn't care that it's Tuesday. It experienced Tuesday 10,000 years ago, and it'll experience Tuesday 10,000 years from now, assuming we still call it that.
This is why I watch glaciers instead of clocks.
The Illusion of the Present Moment
We talk about being present like it's something we can achieve through the right meditation app or morning routine. But what does "present" even mean when you're standing in front of something that exists across geological time?
The ice I'm looking at on the Gosau glacier fell as snow during the Renaissance. Maybe 1543. The year Copernicus published his heliocentric model, fundamentally shifting how humans understood their place in the cosmos. That snow compacted into ice, moved slowly downward through the centuries, and now it's here, reflecting afternoon light into my eyes in 2024.
Is that snow present? Was it present in 1543? Will it be present in 2124 when it finally melts into the valley below?
The question breaks down when you apply it to mountains. They exist in a different temporal dimension than we do. Not timeless—nothing is truly timeless—but operating on a scale that makes our human concept of "now" seem like a nervous tic.
I used to check my phone 47 times a day. I know because I measured it once, horrified by my own compulsion. Each time I checked, I was supposedly trying to stay current, to remain in the present. But I was actually fragmenting my attention into dozens of artificial "nows," each one demanding I react, respond, adjust.
The glacier asks nothing of me.
What Mountains Witnessed
The Traunstein has stood above the Salzkammergut for roughly 230 million years. Think about what that means. Every human drama, every empire, every war, every love story, every betrayal—the mountain was there.
When Roman soldiers marched through these valleys, extracting salt and establishing trade routes, the Traunstein watched. When medieval miners dug deep into the earth, when Mozart composed in nearby Salzburg, when Nazi trains carried stolen art through mountain tunnels, when refugees fled across alpine passes—the mountain watched.
It didn't judge. It didn't intervene. It simply was.
This permanence used to make me feel insignificant. Now it makes me feel liberated. My anxieties about deadlines and schedules and being "on time" shrink to their proper size when I remember that these peaks have witnessed the entire span of human consciousness and will likely outlast it.
Learning to Read Geological Time
You can't understand mountains by looking at them the way you look at your calendar. They require a different kind of attention.
I've been visiting the same spot on the Hallstätter See for seven years now. Same rock outcropping, same view across the water toward the Dachstein massif. In human time, nothing has changed. The rock looks identical. The mountain looks identical.
But in geological time, everything is in motion.
The rock beneath my feet is Triassic limestone, formed 200 million years ago from the compressed remains of marine organisms. It was once the bottom of a shallow sea. Continental drift lifted it thousands of meters into the air. Glaciers carved the valley. The lake filled with meltwater. And now I sit here, a temporary arrangement of atoms, resting on ancient seabed.
The Pace of Stone
Erosion removes about 0.1 to 1 millimeter of rock per year in the Alps, depending on exposure and weather. That means the mountain face I'm looking at has lost roughly 7 millimeters since I started coming here. About the width of a pencil.
I can't see that loss. But it's happening.
Meanwhile, I've checked my phone approximately 120,000 times in those same seven years. Each check lasted maybe 3-4 seconds. That's 400,000 seconds, or about 111 hours, or 4.6 days of my life spent glancing at a screen to see what time it is, whether someone messaged me, if anything changed in the last 20 minutes.
The mountain lost 7 millimeters. I lost 4.6 days to temporal anxiety.
Which change matters more?
Why Glaciers Make Better Clocks
Glaciers tell time honestly. They don't pretend that 3:47 PM is fundamentally different from 3:48 PM. They don't break existence into arbitrary units that create artificial urgency.
The Pasterze glacier in Austria has retreated 3.2 kilometers since 1850. That's real time. That's measurable change that means something. You can stand at the marked positions showing where the ice reached in 1900, 1950, 2000, and see the story written in stone and absence.
This is time as consequence rather than time as measurement.
When I watch the glacier, I'm not watching time pass. I'm watching time accumulate. I'm seeing the physical manifestation of years, decades, centuries compressed into blue ice and crevasses and moraines. The glacier is a record player, and each layer of ice is a groove containing information about atmospheric conditions, volcanic eruptions, industrial pollution, climate patterns.
Your watch tells you when to be somewhere. A glacier tells you what happened.
The Rhythm of Seasons Versus the Rhythm of Seconds
I still keep appointments. I'm not advocating for complete temporal chaos. But I've stopped letting seconds dictate my sense of presence.
Instead, I've learned to read the mountain's clock. The position of snow on the peaks tells me the season more accurately than any calendar. The color of the beech forests—bright green in May, deep emerald in July, gold in October—marks time in a way that feels connected to actual change rather than arbitrary rotation.
The Dachstein's glaciers are smaller than they were when I first saw them. Not because time passed, but because the world warmed. That's a clock worth reading.
The Practice of Mountain Time
How do you actually live this way? How do you function in a world that runs on schedules while maintaining a relationship with geological time?
It's not about rejecting human time. It's about remembering that it's a tool, not a truth.
I still use my phone's clock when I need to catch a train. But I don't wear a watch anymore because I don't want that constant reminder on my wrist, that persistent tick telling me to hurry, to worry, to fragment my attention into smaller and smaller units.
Three Things I Do Differently Now
First, I measure experiences in memory rather than minutes. A two-hour hike in the mountains feels longer and more substantial than a two-hour meeting, not because of the duration but because of the density of attention. When you're navigating scree fields and watching for weather changes, you're present in a way that conference calls don't require.
Second, I've stopped trying to optimize every moment. The mountain doesn't optimize. It simply persists. Some days it's shrouded in clouds. Some days it's brilliantly clear. Neither is better or worse—they're just different conditions of being.
Third, I think about my actions in terms of accumulation rather than accomplishment. What am I building over time? What patterns am I creating that will compound like snowfall into ice? This shift has changed how I work, how I maintain relationships, how I think about daily habits.
The glacier doesn't care about productivity. It cares about persistence.
What the Mountains Teach About Presence
Here's what I've learned from watching mountains instead of clocks: presence isn't about capturing the current moment. It's about recognizing that you're part of a continuum.
The present isn't a point. It's a layer.
When I stand on Triassic limestone, I'm present in 2024. But I'm also standing on 200 million years of geological history. The atoms in my body came from stars that died billions of years ago. The oxygen I'm breathing was produced by plants that evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. The thoughts I'm thinking are shaped by languages that developed over millennia.
Where does "present" begin and end?
The mountain doesn't distinguish between past, present, and future the way we do. It exists in all three simultaneously. The rock is ancient. The erosion is current. The eventual leveling is inevitable. All three states coexist in the same physical form.
This is why I watch glaciers instead of clocks. Because glaciers understand something about time that clocks deliberately obscure: that presence is about depth, not duration.
The Anxiety of Artificial Time
Clock time makes us anxious because it's always running out. Every second that passes is a second lost, a moment you can't get back, a deadline getting closer.
Mountain time doesn't run out. It accumulates.
This shift in perspective has changed my relationship with aging, with productivity, with the fear of wasting time. I'm not wasting time when I sit and watch the Dachstein for an hour. I'm participating in the same activity the mountain has been doing for millions of years: being present to change without being consumed by it.
Living in Two Temporalities
I won't pretend I've transcended human time. I still feel the pressure of deadlines. I still get impatient in slow-moving lines. I still sometimes panic about how quickly years seem to pass.
But I also have this other reference point now. This geological anchor.
When I'm stressed about being late to something, I remember that "late" is a human invention. The mountains don't recognize it. When I'm anxious about aging, I remember that my entire lifespan is a blink compared to the age of the rock I'm standing on. When I'm worried about leaving a legacy, I remember that the Dachstein has watched countless humans come and go, each thinking their moment was uniquely important.
This doesn't make my life meaningless. It makes it appropriately scaled.
I matter to the people I love, to the small circle of existence I can actually influence. I don't matter to the mountain. And that's okay. That's actually a relief.
The Gift of Geological Perspective
The Salzkammergut has given me something I didn't know I needed: permission to exist on a different timescale than my culture demands.
These mountains have been here through everything. They were here before Austria was a concept, before Christianity, before agriculture, before language. They'll be here after all of our current concerns have been forgotten.
That permanence doesn't diminish my experience. It contextualizes it.
My problems are real. My joys are real. My relationships are real. But they're real in human time, not geological time, and understanding the difference has made me less frantic about both.
The Retreat of Ice as a Clock Face
If you want to read the most honest clock in the Alps, look at the glaciers. They're telling us something important about the speed of change.
The Hallstatt glacier has lost 70% of its volume since 1850. The remaining ice is darker now, filled with particulate matter from industrial pollution and wildfires. You can see the layers like tree rings, each one recording atmospheric conditions from the year the snow fell.
This is time made visible. Not the abstract time of clocks and calendars, but actual change—irreversible, measurable, consequential.
When I watch the glacier retreat, I'm not watching time pass. I'm watching the future arrive. The ice that took centuries to form is melting in decades. That's not just a measurement. That's a message.
Clocks tell us to hurry. Glaciers tell us we're already late.
But even in that message, there's something clarifying. The glacier doesn't panic. It doesn't catastrophize. It simply responds to conditions. It melts because the world is warmer. That's cause and effect, not moral judgment.
Maybe that's another lesson from mountain time: change is inevitable, but anxiety about change is optional.
Finding Your Own Geological Anchor
You don't need to live near mountains to practice this kind of presence. You just need something that exists on a different timescale than you do.
A 200-year-old oak tree. A river that's been carving its channel for millennia. A rock formation. A coastline. Anything that reminds you that your urgent concerns are temporary conditions, not permanent truths.
I'm fortunate to live where I do, surrounded by peaks that have witnessed the entire span of human history. But the principle works anywhere. Find something older than your anxieties. Visit it regularly. Let it recalibrate your sense of scale.
The practice is simple: stand still. Look. Notice what changes and what doesn't. Feel the difference between clock time (seconds ticking away) and experiential time (depth of attention). Recognize that presence isn't about capturing the moment—it's about being part of something larger than moments.
This is what the mountains have taught me. This is why I watch glaciers instead of clocks.
Because glaciers understand that time isn't something you save or spend or waste. It's something you participate in. And participation requires presence—not the anxious presence of someone trying to stay current, but the calm presence of someone who knows they're part of a story that began long before them and will continue long after.
The Dachstein will be here tomorrow. It was here yesterday. It's here now. That continuity is the most honest definition of presence I've found.
So I stopped wearing a watch. I started watching ice. And somewhere in that exchange, I found a way to be present that doesn't require constant vigilance, constant checking, constant worry about whether I'm making the most of each moment.
The mountain makes the most of each moment simply by being the mountain. Maybe that's enough for me too.