Never had I lived like this. I’d had no model for it at all. At the beginning, maybe some Hunter S. Thompson inspired drug and sex binge, but that had receded into the ether of the past. I had been seeking pleasure, but I had become mindful. I was living experiences rather than studying an amalgam of concepts.

I had been reflecting over a morning coffee at Eik en Linde. There was a regular who was sitting near the column in the middle of the bar. Beyond him there was just the bartender, Phillip. He and I rarely spoke because he was most often in the kitchen preparing breakfasts. He was aloof but good natured, and he spoke English well enough.

Phillip’s long shock of red hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Few Dutch are true redheads. Sure, strawberry blonde or sandy orange, but Phillip was a true redhead. It was nothing more than an oddity, but it’s what filled my mind while I sipped my coffee.

I wasn’t hungry so I hadn’t ordered any food. I wasn’t in a mood to talk, either, so I appreciated the quiet. I had intended to stir it up with the regulars, but after sitting silently for a while I felt differently. I was mostly awed by how my life was unfolding. Not in a prideful way; I mean it in the sense of “Is this really happening?”

My life had been utterly unlike this. I didn’t want to think about what it had been, but I was on the cusp of doing so. My former life seemed foreign to me. Better to look forward on a day like this, to be present in a fairy-tale city.

When Phillip came by to top off my coffee, I gave him thanks. It came out as gratitude for him, but it was really for the city, its people, its rhythms, the architecture, the art, the canals.

I paid my tab and walked into the cold of late March, my neck snug under a scarf, before coming to a halt at the southwest corner of Middenlaan and Kerklaan. I gave a moment’s thought to Bloem, but I wasn’t in the mood for midday coziness. I wanted—What? I turned to the south to walk along Kerklaan because it was peaceful. I didn’t want anything. “That’s really the crux of it,” I thought. I came upon a bench along the sidewalk and sat down. I sat for a few minutes watching the branches of trees across the street dipping back and forth with the wind.

I sat for two hours thinking of nothing, watching the trees and the people who passed by. It would have been easy to say, “Oh, I could be sitting anywhere and it would be the same.” No, it was specifically this street with its slow rhythm, the cold wind combined with my bundled-up coziness, and the mood that formed as I collaborated as an observer. I wondered if I could sit in such contentment in a mall parking lot. The thought alone jolted me.

I watched a vibrant woman dressed like she was on the cover of a winter magazine walk by me. On another day, I might have struck a conversation with her, but I thought, “I can let her pass knowing the city continually nurtures such encounters.” I could count on one hand the times I had felt lonely since the first day I stepped into Bloem and met Daniel, Nina, and Anabel. Since that time, the floodgates of the city had opened. Those three magic makers, those angels in fashionable clothing, had sprinkled their pixie dust on me.

I was being honest with myself. I gave myself credit for sitting on that cold sidewalk bench while watching the wind and admitted that it was fulfilling.