On wild places, quiet minds, and the beautiful feeling of being wonderfully insignificant.
Dear Friend,
There are places I visit because they are beautiful.
And then there are places that make me feel a little more like myself again.
One of those places, for me, is somewhere up in the mountains.
In 2026, one of my most meaningful adventures was a hike around Steirischer Bodensee, followed by the climb up towards a mountain hut.
I remember the feeling of being surrounded by mountains, the changing views, the sound of water and the quiet that seems to exist only when you leave the familiar world behind.
I went there for a hike. I came back with that rare feeling that something inside me had finally exhaled.
When time stands still
Something happens to my sense of time when I walk through nature.
The hours stop feeling like hours.
I am no longer thinking about what I have to do next, what I forgot yesterday, or what might happen tomorrow.
There is just the path beneath my feet, the air around me, the landscape opening up with every step. My thoughts come and go, but I don’t feel the need to hold on to them.
Sometimes, afterwards, I cannot even remember what I was thinking about. And perhaps that is the point.
For a little while, I am not trying to solve anything. I am not organising, planning, answering, or rushing. I am simply there.
It feels a little like meditation, except there is no need to sit still.
The mountains become the room, the trail becomes the practice, and walking is enough.
The sound of being alive
I love the small things that become impossible to ignore once the noise of everyday life fades away.
The sound of water rushing through a gorge. Birds calling somewhere above the trees. The soft crunch of the path beneath my shoes. The smell of a damp forest after rain. A breeze moving through the branches. The sudden openness of a view when the trees give way and the mountains appear in front of you.
None of these things asks for my attention. They don’t need to be liked, shared, explained, or turned into something useful. They simply exist.
And I think that is part of their magic. They remind me that life is happening all around me, even when I am not looking at a screen or trying to keep up with it.
Beautifully insignificant
There is a particular feeling I get when I look out from a mountain.
The landscape seems endless.
The peaks stretch beyond one another, the valleys become smaller beneath me, and suddenly my everyday worries take up a little less space.
Not because they disappear, or because they do not matter.
They are still there.
But from up high, I remember that they are not the whole world.
I am one tiny human being in an enormous landscape. A visitor, not the centre of it all.
There is something deeply comforting about that realisation.
It makes me feel small, but not in a lonely way.
Small in a way that brings perspective.
It reminds me to be less absorbed by myself, to look beyond my own little corner of the world, and to remember that my actions, even the ordinary ones, touch the lives and places around me.
Nature has a quiet way of putting things back into proportion.
Leaving the noise behind
I don’t go into nature because I am looking for more noise, more people, or another busy place to visit.
Quite the opposite.
I often need a little distance from the pace of the city, from constant notifications, endless opinions, and the feeling that everything must happen immediately.
I have always preferred a small circle of people and conversations that feel genuine.
I enjoy being with people I feel comfortable around, but I also need solitude.
Nature gives me space without asking me to explain why I need it.
Out there, nobody expects me to perform, respond, or be anything other than what I am in that moment.
I can walk quietly.
I can stop and look at the same view for ten minutes.
I can listen to a stream and let the world carry on without me for a while.
I leave to return to myself
Perhaps this is what adventure means to me.
It is not always about reaching the highest summit, collecting impressive distances, or ticking another destination off a list.
Sometimes it is about finding a place where I can hear myself think — and then, eventually, where I don’t need to think at all.
I leave the familiar behind for a few hours.
I walk, breathe, notice, and let the landscape remind me of what matters.
I return tired in the best possible way, with a clearer head and a little more room inside me.
I don’t go into nature to escape my life.
I go there to remember how it feels to truly live.
And maybe that is why I keep going.
Not to get away from the world, but to find my place in it again — one trail, one quiet moment, one mountain view at a time.
We spend so much of our lives trying to feel important. And then we climb a mountain and remember how beautifully small we are.
So maybe, just maybe, we don’t go into the wild to conquer anything. Maybe we go there to remember where our place is.
After all, we are only guests there, learning how to be quiet in someone else’s home.
Here’s to taking the longer way, following the path a little further, and finding a little more wild along the way. And here’s to finding our own way back to ourselves.
Love,
