Moving Towards Mountains

I’m sitting in Copenhagen. It’s February, it’s gray, it’s calm. Denmark wraps around you like that. Gentle, ordered, kind. The people here are incredible. The life works. I have everything I’m supposed to want, and mostly, I do.

But then a photo landed on my phone today. My friend’s family at the end of a lake. Mountains behind them, massive and brooding. The sky packed in, heavy with grey, that moment before the weather breaks. And I felt it in my chest. That pull. That ache.

I’m not missing New Zealand. Missing implies it’s gone. It’s not gone. It’s waiting. But this isn’t really about New Zealand. I’ve stood in front of mountains in Patagonia, in Yunnan, in the Alps, and every time the same words come out of me. It feels like home. Not because of where I am, but because of what they carry. The weight of them. The scale. The mountains don’t belong to any country. And neither does this feeling.

The mountains are right in a way that nothing else quite is. When I’m standing in front of them, or even just looking at a photograph, something inside me settles and unsettles at the same time. Like I’m finally small enough to be honest. They don’t care about your plans or your ambitions or whether you’re building the right thing. They’re just there. Ancient. Indifferent. And there’s something liberating in that indifference. You get to exist without justifying it. Without proving it.

I could sit on a pebble beach for days with those mountains across the water. Just watching. Waiting for the weather to turn. Because that’s the thing about the weather there. It’s alive. It’s not just backdrop. It’s presence. When the clouds start to pack in and the gray deepens and you feel the tension building before the storm hits, that’s when I feel most awake. Most real. Not comfortable. Real.

It wasn’t always this way. Or maybe it was, and I just didn’t have the words for it yet.

When I was seven or eight, eternity first terrified me. Not as an abstract concept, but as a weight on my chest. What does it mean to exist forever? To not exist at all? I watched other people find answers in religion, in belief systems, in frameworks that made sense to them. But those never quite fit. They felt like clothes that belonged to someone else. Wrong fit. Wrong fabric. Wrong body.

When I was fifteen or sixteen, I wrote a poem called “I Wish I Was a Rock.” I can’t remember most of it now, but the premise was simple. Rocks don’t think. They don’t feel. They don’t lie awake at three in the morning asking questions that don’t have floors. They just exist. Complete. Indifferent. Done. I wanted that so badly I wrote it down and tried to make it true.

But before any of this made sense there was the noise. And I need you to understand what the noise was like because without it none of this lands.

Imagine your mind is a room with no doors and every wall is a mirror and every mirror is asking you the same question. What’s the point, what’s the point, what’s the point. And you can’t look away because looking away is just another mirror. You’re seven years old and you’re lying in bed and the ceiling is infinite and you’re falling upward into it and the word forever is expanding in your chest like a lungful of water. You’re fifteen and you’re writing poems about being a rock because being a rock means the mirrors stop. You’re twenty-three and you’re on a train and everyone around you is reading newspapers and checking phones and you’re sitting there vibrating because you can see it, you can see the void behind everything, the paper-thin membrane between existing and not, and nobody else seems to notice and you can’t understand why they’re not screaming. You’re thirty and you haven’t slept properly in weeks and the anxiety is a physical thing now, it lives in your jaw and your fists and the base of your skull, and the depression isn’t sadness it’s weight, it’s gravity doubled, it’s waking up and feeling the air resist you. And the thoughts, the big ones, the mountain-sized ones about dust and stars and what you become when you stop becoming, those thoughts are in the room too but they’re not comforting yet, they’re just more mirrors, more falling, more drowning in questions that don’t have bottoms.

That was the inside of my head for a very long time.

Then something shifted. The medication helped. I’ll say that plainly because it matters. SSRIs gave me enough floor to stand on. Enough silence to hear myself think. And my neurodivergent brain, the one that had tortured me for decades, started to work for me instead of against me. The pattern recognition. The obsessive depth. The inability to leave a question alone. All the things that nearly destroyed me became the things that let me see clearly.

And what I saw was simple, and brutal, and true.

I will turn to dust. My body will return to stone and soil and eventually find its way back into mountains and stars and all the vast, indifferent things that were here before me and will be here long after. That’s not a belief system. That’s physics. That’s geology. That’s the only answer that ever fit. And instead of that being the end of the story, it became the beginning of peace.

The mountains aren’t just landscape. They’re where I’m going. Not metaphorically. Literally. I will become part of them. I always was. And every time I stand in front of them I’m just recognising what’s already true.

All the work, all the building, all the noise of a life being lived. None of it changes this. It doesn’t compete with it. But it does sit under it now. I know why I’m doing what I’m doing. Not for success or validation or proving something to anyone. I’m doing it because the mountains are waiting and I want to have lived. I want to be awake for it. I want to stand in front of something vast and ancient and know that I was here. That I showed up. That I didn’t waste the walking.

The mountains are patient. I’m getting closer.

Everything else is just the walking.