The Mountains We All Climb
On Peace, Loss – and the Quiet Arrival in the Now
Today, on my flight from Mexico City to Los Cabos, I sat next to a famous Norwegian mountaineer - Kristin Harila.
At the beginning of our conversation, I thought our lives couldn’t be more different. She climbs mountains – big ones. Her next destination: Nepal.
Kristin pointed at my Patagonia belt bag as she happily pulled out her own from her backpack. “Look, I have the same one, just in a different color,” she said, grinning. I had to smirk because I thought that she probably uses hers during her trainings, and I wear mine as a practical lifestyle accessory.
When she told me that she had lost one of her best friends on her last climb, that was the moment we left the small talk behind.
I told her about my diagnosis – GNE myopathy – that I received five years ago, and that I'm slowly losing the ability to walk and move like I used to.
Climbing mountains? Completely out of the question.
Compassionately, we looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. And because we were short on time – and that’s just who I am – I genuinely asked her:
“What’s your dream?”
“I want to find peace,” she said. “Stop climbing mountains, buy my own farm, grow my own vegetables, and have some chickens.”
She had searched for peace in the mountains – and always found it there.
The Summit
On the summit, she told me, your sense of time and space dissolves.
For a moment, you merge with the essence of life.
You may dive into a state of deep peace and abundance.
A stillness that isn’t just perceived through your ears.
A clarity that isn’t only seen through your eyes.
Air so pure, it doesn’t just fill your lungs –
but your whole being enters the space of God.
A majestic feeling of gratitude, love, and vastness.
Reverence for the power of life.
Meaning.
Your body becomes small, and your life’s purpose – as your mind once defined it – retreats.
And as your heart begins to perceive how infinitely precious everything is...
Our identities dissolve – into nothingness.
And at the same time, we experience — that we are everything.
There was never anything to achieve.
Nothing to become.
Everything is – here and now – already whole.
Peace.
But that peace stays up there on the mountain.
Up there, you may taste it, feel it – but you can’t take it with you.
The Mountains We All Climb
And I realized:
We all climb our own mountains in search of peace.
We all long to stop striving.
We long for wholeness and abundance.
Most of us don’t search for peace on the Kilimanjaro.
But we do search for it –
to finally let go of the inner sense of lack we carry about ourselves.
The promotion. The perfect partner. The house we always dreamed of. The second child. The ideal body. The road trip that’s on our bucket list. The next personal record …
We all have these small and big goals in our heads.
We create mental images and do everything to reach them –
to feel, for a short moment of time, a sense of peace.
And when we reach the goal – and it does feel like peace for the split second that we reached it – we keep going. Already on the lookout for the next mountain.
Searching again for that short moment of peace, when we reached the top.
What If Peace Is Already Here?
But what if peace is much closer than we think?
What if we don’t have to do anything to find it?
What if we’re allowed to let go – to step out of the endless cycle of becoming?
What if peace can’t be achieved –
but is only ever experienced
in the moment we stop wanting?
What if it is the wanting itself — that creates the unrest?
Letting go of our desires — is not just uncomfortable.
We are resistant to it —because accepting the life we live and stopping the chase for the life we want is deeply painful and terrifying.
For me, it symbolizes Kristin’s friend,
whom she had to leave behind on the mountain.
And it symbolizes the loss of a part of my mobility
that I had to leave behind in the past.
Already Arrived
Maybe peace is not a destination.
But a quiet space that opens
when we stop searching.
When we are willing to let something go –
not because we’ve failed,
but because we’ve understood:
We have already arrived.
On the surface, Kristin and I couldn’t be more different.
But in truth, we might be exactly the same.
Thank you, Kristin, for this encounter.
May we find peace wherever we are.
Kristin Jonassen Harila
Kristin is a Norwegian-Sámi mountaineer and former cross-country skier.
She climbed all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks and, in 2023, set a world record by summiting them within just 92 days alongside Sherpa Tenjen Lama.
