How to Climb a Mountain (Without Thinking About the Mountain)

I look up and the mountain crest imposes itself in its grandeur, stealing the entire landscape. The altitude takes my breath away. A single thought overwhelms me: I am so close to God.

Everything I see around me - the trees, the rocks, the car park at the base of the mountain - loses its importance, becomes dots of colour in an image so vast it seems like an entire universe. And I am here, up high, so close to something vast and untouchable, that nothing else matters.

Then a second thought hits me: How did I get here?

I look down. The car park looks like a toy. The cars are just tiny dots of metal. Impossible that I climbed this high. Impossible that my feet travelled all this distance.

And suddenly I understand why I don’t remember: the mind refuses to see the path in its totality. At the base of the mountain, looking up at the peak, you feel crushed. The distance paralyses you. The brain calculates all the kilometres, all the suffering, all the uncertainty and whispers to you: You can’t. It’s too much.

Fear doesn’t come from the mountain. It comes from our devastating capacity to imagine everything at once.

But the climb doesn’t work in totality. You never climb an entire mountain. You climb three metres. Then three more. Step by step - not because it sounds poetic, but because it’s the only reality our psyche can digest without collapsing.

You fragment the infinite. You transform it from nightmare into a series of banal gestures. One step. Another. You don’t look up. You don’t calculate. You live only in the next three metres.

And yes, you will stop. You will feel like you can’t go on. Your chest will burn, your legs will tremble. You will need to stop and you must. But one thing to remember: don’t stop for too long.

Because what happens in pauses that are too long? The body cools down. The muscles stiffen. But worse, the mind starts calculating again. You exit the rhythm, the hypnotic flow of steps, and you find yourself back in overwhelming reality: there are still so many kilometres, so much pain, so much uncertainty.

Momentum isn’t about speed. It’s about continuity. It’s about remaining in the simple, repetitive, almost meditative gesture of steps, before the mind has a chance to tell you the story about impossibility.

How many times do we give up exactly when we are so close? We confuse exhaustion with failure. We interpret the need for a pause as a final verdict. The body says “I need two minutes,” and the mind translates “I will never succeed.”

A glass of water. Deep breaths. Looking around, not up, not down: just here, where your feet are now. Then one small step. Just one. And you will discover - you will always discover - that you can take one more.

The transcendence we feel at the peak, that feeling of being so close to God, it’s not the prize for reaching the destination. It’s the retroactive amazement that we were capable of something that seemed inconceivable. It’s the shock of looking back and realising: I did this. Me. Step by step. Without understanding how.

The mind doesn’t carry us up the mountain. The mind keeps us at the base. The body carries us up, as long as we don’t give the mind too much time to talk.

Step by step. It’s not a cliché. It’s the only chance.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​