Vernay Journal · Time & Nature

Two days in the mountains feel like four.

Everyone who comes to the mountains with me ends up saying it. For years I wondered why, until an anthropologist gave me part of the answer.

Pierre Vernay · Vernay Wellbeing

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It happens on nearly every expedition. Somewhere around the second evening, someone looks up and says it, usually without meaning to. "It feels like we've been here a week." Two days in the mountains, and the time has somehow stretched to twice its size.

I felt this myself for years before I had any way to explain it. You come back from two days on the alpage and your ordinary life feels oddly distant, as though you had been away far longer than the calendar will admit.

Now picture the opposite kind of time. The 8:30 call. The emails you answer in the gap between two meetings. Lunch in front of a screen, if you can even call it lunch. The evening that is gone before you have noticed it arrive. Whole weeks that pass without leaving much of a mark.

Same number of hours, the same clocks on the wall, and yet a completely different experience of time.

Maybe the real question is not how much time you have. Maybe it is what kind of time you are living in.

The man who studied invisible things

Edward T. Hall was an American anthropologist who spent his career on the things cultures never say out loud. How close we stand to one another. What we do with silence. And the way we live inside time.

In his book The Dance of Life he described two very different relationships people have with time. Tap each one below to get a feel for the difference.

M-Time

Monochronic time

The time of the clock. Linear, and segmented, one thing after another. Appointments, deadlines, agendas. Time becomes a resource you spend, save, waste or lose. Switzerland, Germany and North America all live this way. It is the time that runs our trains, our offices and our inboxes.

Tap to live it
P-Time

Polychronic time

The time of the moment. Fluid and layered, several things happening at once, with relationships coming before schedules. A conversation does not get cut short just because the clock says so. Much of the Mediterranean, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa lives closer to this rhythm. Time here is not spent. It is inhabited.

Tap to live it

Hall never argued that one was better than the other. His point was that most of us have no idea which one we are living in. We inherited a particular relationship with time, and we have never thought to question it.

Now look at your day once more. The meetings stacked back to back, the inbox, the calendar cutting your hours into neat little blocks. That is not only a schedule. It is a whole culture, running quietly in the background of your life.

A man and his dog standing among golden larch trees at dawn in the Swiss Alps
First frost · 7:40 in the morning
The larch doesn't check whether autumn is on schedule.

Everything in this forest is happening at the same time. Growth, rest, exchange, decay. Nothing waits its turn, and nothing is in a hurry.

What Hall left unsaid, and nature shows plainly

Step outside the schedule for a moment and look at the living world.

A forest is about as polychronic as it gets. Everything happens at once: growth, decay, exchange, rest. And still, nothing about it feels rushed. The marmot does not negotiate the timing of its hibernation.

Your body belongs to that same world. Heart rhythm, breath rhythm, sleep cycles, the way your energy rises and falls with the seasons. You are a living system that runs on biological time, which is circadian rather than calendar, and shaped more like a wave than a line.

Most of us are carrying a quiet contradiction: a polychronic body trying to live a monochronic life.

We cut our days into half-hour blocks and then wonder why we feel so scattered. We reply across three apps at the same time and call it multitasking, when really it is clock time sliced so thin that it starts to cut us. We even book rest into the calendar like another meeting, and then wonder why it does not actually restore anything.

Self-check

Which time are you living in right now?

Six quick questions. No score and no judgement, just a mirror. Answer for your real week, not your ideal one.

MonochronicPolychronic

This is a reflection tool inspired by Edward T. Hall's work. It is meant for self-awareness, not assessment or diagnosis.

The practice for this week
Ready

One minute. In through the nose for four counts, then out slowly for six. Nothing to achieve here, just follow the circle.

A man in an orange down jacket cooking outdoors on snow-dusted grass at golden hour
Snow over grass · no next slot
Breakfast takes as long as it takes.

Nobody is waiting on a reply. Your attention settles into one unbroken present: breath, steam, cold air, light.

Why two days become four

Here is what tends to surprise people about our expeditions. We do not walk all that much. This is not a trek. Most of those days go to something modern life has made surprisingly rare, which is resting deeply and practising.

Conscious breathing in the morning and again in the evening. Scent practices. Long meals with no screen and no deadline attached. Sleep with no alarm set. Movement when the body asks for it, and stillness when it does not. The idea is straightforward. You give your own cycles, sleep and breath and digestion and movement, the room to find their natural rhythm again, instead of the rhythm the calendar usually forces on them.

And as the tension you have been storing for months starts to loosen, something shifts in your sense of time.

Part of it is plain sensory. Research on how we perceive time suggests that rich, unfamiliar experience stretches time in memory. A day full of new impressions, alpine light, cold air, woodsmoke, real silence, feels far longer looking back than a week of meetings that all blur together.

The other part is Hall's. Up there, you step out of segmented time completely. There is no next slot. The mountain does not keep an agenda. Your attention stops hopping from block to block and settles into one continuous present: breath, scent, the light moving across the rock. You are no longer spending time. You are living inside it.

We often see the same thing in the data, with HRV patterns shifting as the days add up. There is nothing magical about it. It is simply a body finding its way back to a rhythm it already knows. And on the final evening, almost without fail, someone says it again. It feels like we've been here a week.

A man splitting wood by hand on a green alpine meadow below late-season snow patches
Chemin d'alpage · 2,000 m
One task. No timer.

The sound of the axe, and nothing after it. This is what undivided time actually feels like.

You don't have to choose

Clock time is not the enemy here. It gets the train to the platform at 9:04. It makes you good at your work. It built most of the life you have.

But Hall's work points at something worth remembering. Clock time is a tool, not the truth. And like any tool, you should be able to set it down when you need to.

The practice, once this week

Go outside with no fixed duration in your head. Not a 20-minute walk. No podcast quietly measuring the distance for you. Leave the phone in your pocket, or better, leave it at home.

Walk until something makes you stop. A smell, a view, a bench in the sun. Then stay there until you genuinely feel like moving again.

That is the whole thing. You are not exercising and you are not optimising anything. You are just letting your body remember the other kind of time.

People tend to come back from this a little lighter. Nothing has been fixed. They are simply more rested than before.

If something in you just said yes to that, the guided practices live in the Vernay app, with more on breath, scent and the science of slowing down. And if you want to feel the other kind of time for yourself in the Alps, that is what the expeditions are for.