Going to Tungnath with My Colleagues

We were halfway up the steep path to Tungnath when I realised I had not thought about my laptop once in six hours.

For months, my routine had been identical every single day. Wake up, open the screen, look at code and messages, close the screen late at night, and go to sleep with my eyes burning. It felt like my whole world had shrunk down to a fourteen-inch rectangle. My head felt heavy all the time, and even weekends did not seem to help because the laptop was always sitting right there on my desk, glowing.

Then someone suggested a trip. A few of us from work talked about getting out of the city. None of us had done a trip together before. We picked Tungnath, the highest Shiva temple in the world, sitting up in the mountains of Uttarakhand.

We packed our bags and left. The transition from sitting in an office chair to climbing a mountain path was sudden.

The trail to Tungnath starts from Chopta. It is not a huge distance on paper, just around three and a half kilometres, but the slope is steep and the air gets thin quickly. Within twenty minutes of walking, I was gasping for breath. My legs felt like lead. I am used to sitting still for twelve hours at a stretch, so climbing paved steps at three thousand metres above sea level was a shock to the system.

Every few hundred metres, we had to stop. We sat on stone benches by the side of the path, watching clouds float past below us. The air was cold and crisp, nothing like the stale indoor air of an air-conditioned room.

Walking with colleagues in a setting like that changes how you talk to each other. When you are at work, every conversation has a reason. You talk about tasks, deadlines, and problems that need fixing. On the trail, nobody was talking about work. We talked about how tired our legs were, how cold the wind felt, and how quiet everything was around us. We laughed at how unfit we all were.

As we climbed higher, the vegetation began to thin out. The green trees gave way to bare rocky ground and patches of grass. The sky looked wide and clear.

When we finally reached the temple at the top, the view was incredible. You could see snowy peaks stretching across the horizon under the cold sun. We stood there for a long time, just taking it in. There were no notifications popping up. There was no unread chat message waiting for a reply. There was only the cold mountain wind and the quiet space all around us.

I had been feeling completely drained before we left. I thought I just needed more sleep, but sleep never seemed to fix the tiredness. Standing up there, looking out over the mountains with people I usually only saw through video calls and chat boxes, I realised what was actually missing.

It was not just physical rest. It was a complete change of pace.

Looking at a screen twenty-four hours a day locks your brain into a narrow, constant state of urgency. Going on a trip like this breaks that completely. It forces you to look up, move your body, and exist in the real world for a while. Doing it with people you work with makes it even better, because you see each other as actual human beings instead of just names on a screen.

By the time we walked back down to Chopta, my legs were sore and my body was exhausted in a completely different way. But my mind felt light. The heavy, foggy feeling in my head was gone.

Sometimes you do not need a complicated solution when you are burnt out. You just need to shut the laptop, pack a bag, and go somewhere high with people who understand what it takes to step away.