The hiss of steel on snow. The bite of an edge. The world shrinks to a single, perfect turn. In the Alps, I traded digital static for the profound silence of flow, finding a quiet mind not by stopping, but by moving with purpose.
My phone buzzes with ghosts. Emails from yesterday, notifications for tomorrow. Even here, thousands of feet up in the French Alps, the digital noise clings to me like frost. I came here to escape it, to trade the endless scroll for the endless white. But for the first few hours, my mind is still back there, a frantic city of worries and to-do lists. My turns are clumsy, my thoughts are loud, and I’m skiing with my head, not my body.
Then, something shifts. It happens on a wide, empty run, a canvas of corduroy under a pale blue sky. Maybe it’s the cold air finally scouring my lungs clean, or maybe my body just gets tired of listening to my brain. I stop thinking and start feeling. The subtle pressure in the arch of my foot, the pull of gravity, the bite of the steel edge as it finds purchase in the firm snow. My body remembers a language my mind had forgotten.
Snow-covered peaks of the Dolomites under a clear winter sky
One turn flows into the next. It’s a dance. Left, a whisper of displaced snow. Right, a clean, satisfying hiss. The world shrinks to this single, rhythmic action. There is no past, no future. There is only the mountain, the skis, and the invisible line I’m drawing between them. The ghost-buzz in my pocket is silent, or maybe I just can’t hear it anymore over the sound of my own momentum.
Riding the chairlift back up, the silence is different. It’s not empty; it’s full. It’s the calm after a storm, the deep peace that follows intense focus. Down below, other skiers are carving their own stories into the mountain, each one a fleeting signature of joy or effort. We are all, in our own way, seeking the same thing.
We think we come to the mountains for the views, for the thrill. But sometimes, we’re just looking for a place quiet enough to hear ourselves think—or better yet, to stop thinking altogether.
For the rest of the day, I chase that feeling. Not speed, not perfection, but that state of clean, quiet flow. It’s a reminder that the most profound escapes aren’t about going somewhere new, but about finding a way to become new, even for just a few perfect, silent turns.
