I brought a ball to the valley today, thinking I'd kick it around by the water. The kind of thing that sounds simple until you're actually standing there with the mountains watching and the lake so still it looks like glass.
My friends and I used to play in the park near the city, all noise and movement and someone always shouting. But this place does something different to you. The air is thinner up here, or maybe I'm just more aware of it. The ball felt heavier than usual in my hands.
We started near the grass by the shore, and for a few minutes it was fun, genuinely fun, the kind where you're not thinking about anything else. But then I noticed how the sound of the ball hitting boot echoed off the rock faces. How the ducks scattered when we got too loud. How the mountains seemed to lean in closer, not to watch us play but to ask us to be quieter.
So we stopped. We sat down on the grass with our backpacks and a thermos of tea, and I watched the ball just sit there on the meadow, forgotten. One of my friends laughed and said the lake didn't want to be disturbed. I think she was right.
There's something about moving slowly in a place like this. About letting the sport be just the walking, the breathing, the sitting still and watching how the light moves across the water. I'm learning that not every kind of movement needs to be loud.
