Shayan Afzal

From the plane, an hour north of San Francisco, I saw this snow-capped mountain, its peaks like the jagged, indifferent teeth of some ancient, sleeping beast. Growing up surrounded by mountains, this one didn’t exactly stop me dead in my tracks. But from up here, at 35,000 feet, the perspective shift did something weird to my brain. It was like nature was giving me this grand, indifferent reminder of its scale and our comparative insignificance.

The landscape below unfolded in a hyper-realistic detail that seemed almost contrived. Every ridge and crevice rendered in stark contrast, the mountain stood as a colossal monument to time itself, utterly indifferent to the pressurized metal tube slicing through the air above. It just was, existing in its silent, timeless majesty, a geological shrug to our fleeting, frantic existence.

I thought about the mountains of my childhood, their constant, unchanging presence. This one felt different, maybe because seeing it from this altitude, this remove, underscored the dissonance between human time and geological time. Up here, the mountain’s permanence seemed almost mocking, a slow, grinding reminder of nature’s endless patience versus our rapid, anxiety-laden sprint through life.

And then, as if on cue, the plane banked, the view shifted, and the mountain was gone, swallowed by the horizon and the haze. It was a fleeting moment, but it left a lingering sense of insignificance, a kind of existential hangover. The mountain didn’t provide any grand epiphanies or life-altering insights. Instead, it was a silent acknowledgment of the vast, uncaring world beyond our own insular concerns. It was like the universe itself gave a casual, indifferent shrug, saying, “This is here, and it’s huge, and it doesn’t care.”

Nice.