If you’re in love with the mountains, like me, but are still stuck in the city, chances are you might have wondered what it’s like to actually call them home. Two years ago, after quitting my job and spending some time abroad freelancing, I seized the opportunity and moved to a mountain hut in western Tyrol, Austria, for a summer job. These three months turned out to be some of the most precious of my life. And they changed something inside me for good.
“I’ve always wanted to do that, too“, was the reaction I heard from a surprisingly large number of people when I told them that I was going to work in a mountain hut for the summer. “Somehow the right opportunity just never came up.“ To be honest, for me, it was more a spontaneous idea than a lifelong dream. An idea that popped up in my head and got stuck there, after I decided to quit my job – just like that – and spend some weeks in Portugal and Morocco where I was hoping to get struck by enlightenment about what it was I wanted to do. And since I’m a fan of taking a leap of faith once in a while, and venturing into the unknown, I applied for two huts, and chose one with a young host couple, about my age, who were about to run their third summer season in the mountains.
Goodbye office, hello mountain views
From our skype talks and what I’d read about working in a mountain hut, I had a vague idea of what would expect me. Which was: twelve- to fifteen-hour-shifts, six days a week, a sparse room (at least, I was going to have my own), and lots of physical work. But also: not the worst kind of place to work at (I mean: the views!). And above all: doing something totally different for a while. No sitting in front of my laptop for 8 hours a day, no writing or reading mails. Coming from an office job (which I’ve actually never really liked), I thought this could be a nice change.
What I didn’t expect was that this summer would change so much inside me and turn out to be the simplest, but also some of the most intense and happiest weeks of my life. And I’m convinced that there’s a connection there. In times where we’re permanently bombarded by thousands of impressions, where we make tens of thousands of decisions a day, where we’re distracted by our phone (not only by the disturbing pull effect of social media, but also by simply seeing our phone in sight), and occupied by the things on our to-do list – we’re fed up. We’re longing for simplicity, for a way out of this hamster wheel, of always being super busy, which, to be completely honest here, I also sometimes think I enjoy. Until I take a break and see what life can be like without all these things: simple, pure – and yet so much more rewarding.
When only the now matters
There are only few things that compare to getting up early, grabbing a cup of coffee and taking a walk at the dawn of the day, in absolute quiet, and with the view that comes with living on 2.040 meters, reading a few pages of my book or just sitting there with my eyes closed and letting the sun shine on my face. Or to turning the cleaning session in the kitchen into a spontaneous dance party and stopping only for a quick break to watch the sun go down in yet another outrageously breathtaking spectacle. Or to falling into bed happily and exhausted, with your body letting you know with every muscle that you’ve worked today – and realising that you’ve hardly checked your phone all day, and all you need before bed is maybe a few pages of your book, or some good tunes, and good night.
Of course, there were days when I could imagine better things than cleaning toilets and wiping strangers’ toothpaste from bathroom mirrors, but somehow, the monotony and routine of these tasks also had something calming to me. And oh, how many new artists and songs I’ve discovered during these mornings making beds, somewhere between being lost in thought and goofing around with the others from my team, which was, no doubt, the best team I could have imagined.
There was a lightness to these weeks that I’ve hardly ever known before. Maybe it was the routine of the days, which where always more or less the same, but then again totally different. Maybe it was the fact that I always knew what I had to do: I knew my tasks, and they were mostly fairly predictable. All that counted for the day was to make sure our guests had a great time. Besides the fact that it’s not the worst goal to make people happy, with all the thankfulness and warmth that we received, I’m convinced it was also the “absence“ of the outside world. I was in a bubble, a mountain bubble, and on the rare occasions whenever I did watch or read the news, I quickly got bored of the same headlines of catastrophes and old, narcissistic, misogynistic men acting like they were some kind of God.
I didn’t care much about what was happening out there. I cared about the stories the people I brought dumplings and cake told me. I cared about soaking up the views every time I went outside, and feeling grateful, about cooking (and eating) great food, and about having fun in between. I even found joy in explaining the house rules for the hundredth time, and marveled at the majesty of the nature that surrounded me, every day, again and again. I was living the present. And: I was feeling a deep connection to nature, and to the people that came here to experience it.
And as ignorant as this may sound – shutting out the injustices and horrors of this crazy world – for me, as a person who tends to always overthink and lets things get too close, this was very therapeutic. And besides all the physical work, the not-worrying, the living-in-the-moment and the realising how lucky I was gave me so much energy that I think it’s been less than a handful of off-days that I’ve spent actually doing nothing. I walked, I ran, I hiked, from half an hour to the entire day, on nearly every one of my free days. I was feeling free, light, and happy.
Where simplicity meets majesty
Life in the mountains is different. You meet people on a different level. Surnames and the formal address don’t exist on 2.040 metres, and there’s an additional immediate connection because you share at least one passion: the mountains. And darn, after spending more than the occasional Saturday or weekend in them, after really calling them home for these three months, I’m now even more fascinated by them, and what an incredible power they hold. They’re a place where simplicity meets the full force of nature, which you get to feel when you suddenly have no drinking water. Or when you get surprised by a thunderstorm while walking along a ridge, and think you’re about to die. They’re a place that showed me just what kind of life also exists out there. And that changed the way I see life, and especially the working world, forever.
It’s shown me once again that you really don’t need much to be happy: neither a thousand options to spend the evening nor fancy clothes. It reinforced what I already knew before: that I’m definitely not the kind to spend all my working days in an office, writing mails and editing LinkedIn posts, for the rest of my life. It’s planted hundreds of new ideas into my already restless head, and above all: It’s given me a new home. A truly special kind of home that I love to come back to once in a while, as long as I’m still stuck in an office job, to recharge my batteries in this idyllic other kind of world – my happy mountain bubble.