I recently heard a man talk about moving to Iowa after living among the mountains.
For some time after the move, he felt off. Nothing was necessarily wrong in a way he could clearly identify, but something was missing. Eventually, he realized that he no longer had the mountains.
The mountains had been more than scenery to him. They were where he went to breathe, regain perspective, and reconnect with something larger than himself—perhaps even something divine. When life became crowded or heavy, the mountains gave him a place to step outside it.
Then he moved to Iowa, where there were no mountains to retreat to.
I understood what he meant.
Just the other Saturday, I went golfing. There among the grass, trees, water, sand, open sky, and friends, I felt happy. For those few hours, life seemed lighter.
Yet nothing in my circumstances had changed.
My job was still my job. My family relationships were the same. The political world had not become less divided. The concerns waiting for me before I arrived at the golf course were still waiting when I left.
And yet, for a while, my experience of life had changed.
Why?
Why is peace sometimes so easy to find beside a lake, on a golf course, in the woods, or among the mountains—and so difficult to find in the life to which we return?
Perhaps you have experienced this too.
You go somewhere beautiful, attend a retreat, sit beside the ocean, walk through the trees, or spend an evening laughing with people you love. Something inside you becomes quieter. You feel more present. You remember, if only briefly, that life can feel spacious and whole.
Then you return home.
The emails are still there. The difficult person is still difficult. The bills have not disappeared. Your body still carries its pain. Your mind returns to the same worries, arguments, regrets, and fears.
The mountain gave you peace, but it could not come home with you.
Or could it?
That may be the real question.
Perhaps the purpose of the mountain is not to become a place where we escape our lives. Perhaps it is to show us something about how we experience life when we are no longer gripping it so tightly.
In the mountains, on the golf course, or beside the water, our circumstances may not change—but our attention does. We stop rehearsing yesterday and preparing for tomorrow. We notice the light, the air, the trees, the people beside us. For a few moments, we are not trying to solve our entire lives.
We are simply there.
The peace we feel may not come from leaving life behind. It may come from briefly meeting life without all the resistance, judgment, and mental noise we normally carry into it.
But then comes the more difficult question:
How do we live that way when the view is ordinary, the people are irritating, the work is repetitive, and nothing around us feels sacred?
How do we bring the mountain into the valley?
That is where practice begins.