Never had I lived like this previously. I’d had no model for it at all. At the beginning, maybe some Hunter Thompson inspired drug and sex binge, but that had been receding into the ether of the past. For what I had started doing, there was no model for me. I felt like a hedonist becoming an existentialist becoming a shaman. But none of those concepts held much for me because I hadn’t studied them extensively. I was too close to living the experiences for them to become such an amalgam of concepts.
I had been reflecting over a morning coffee at Eik en Linde. There were few customers in the establishment, one regular who sat near the column in the middle of the bar. Beyond him there was just me and Phillip, Kasper having taken the day off. Phillip and I rarely talked because he was usually in the kitchen preparing breakfasts, but even when he was behind the bar he was more vocal with the locals, speaking in Dutch. He spoke English well enough, but he was mostly aloof, in a good-natured way, when around me.
Maybe it was his long shock of red hair that he had pulled back in a pony tail. So few Dutch are true redheads like Phillip. Sure, strawberry blonde, sandy orange, but Phillip came across as Danish rather than Dutch in appearance. It was nothing more than an oddity, but it’s what filled my mind while I sipped on my coffee.
I wasn’t hungry so I hadn’t ordered any food. I wasn’t in any great mood to talk, either, so I appreciated the relative quiet. I had fully intended to rouse about with any number of regulars—hopefully Peter, included—but after sitting silently for a bit I felt differently. I was mostly awed by my life. Not in a prideful way; I mean it in the sense of “Is this really happening?”
For that to make any sense at all, it would mean my life had been utterly unlike this. And it had been utterly unlike this. I was trying to figure out why that had happened, if I had let it happen or if there was nothing I could have done without going to live in a fairy-tale foreign city in which I knew no one and living there just long enough to become quasi-native. My former life, which happened to have made up 37/38ths of my life, seemed more foreign to me than my new life. I felt like a cutting off a dying old tree that had been living in desolate climates not known for sustaining life and was now growing in conditions that were meant, especially, for trees like me.
When Phillip came by to top off my coffee, I felt a wave of gratitude. It came out as gratitude for him, but it was really for the whole of my experiences in Amsterdam, all of the people, all of the places, all of the architecture, the art, the rhythms, the canals, I just wanted to bathe in it and, suppressing a laugh, I realized I was.
I paid my tab and walked out into the cold of late March, my neck snug under a scarf and my hands warmed by gloves, before coming to a halt at the southwest corner of Plantage Middenlaan and Plantage Kerklaan. I gave a moment’s thought to Bloem, but decided against it. I had spent a few days in a row there and, as I stood at the corner, I felt as if turning to the north for Bloem threatened the day’s possibilities. I wasn’t in the mood for Bloem’s midday coziness. I wanted—
What? I turned to the south to walk along Kerklaan mostly because it was a quiet street and I wanted peace to think. I didn’t want anything. I came upon a bench along the sidewalk and sat down. “That’s really the crux of it,” I thought. “I don’t want for anything.” I sat for a few minutes watching the branches of trees across the street dipping back and forth with the winds. “That’s actually enough for me right now, just to sit and watch the branches move.”
So I did. I sat there for almost two hours thinking of nothing much at all, simply watching the trees and the few people who passed by walking, cycling, or driving. It would have been easy to say, “Oh, I could be sitting anywhere and it would be the same at this point; I’ve achieved Zen.” But, no, it was specifically this street with its slow rhythm, the cold wind combined with my bundled-up outdoor coziness, and the mood that formed as I collaborated with Eik en Linde earlier. I imagined if I could sit in such contentment in a mall parking lot. The thought alone jolted me. It felt like a jagged lightning bolt had exploded within me. Not a good feeling. I was no Zen master; I simply benefitted from the environment Amsterdam offered.
I couldn’t see anything but opportunities in the city any more. Every moment was an opportunity in Amsterdam. I had never felt, on an everyday basis, like I was always exactly where I wanted to be when I wanted to be there and, often enough, with the people I wanted to be with. The latter was, in my prior experience, a fairy tale fantasy. The very notion that there could even be enough people in the world I would actually want to be with—that’s a pretty small number so one might think the odds were in my favor—was folly to me when I lived in the States. But here I was in a city that seemed to have gobbled up more than its fair share of incredible persons.
As I was still sitting on the bench, I watched a vibrant young woman dressed like she was on the cover of a winter cycling magazine and thought, "She may be amazing, but I can let her pass because I know there are more amazing persons all around me, every day. I don’t even have to interact with them in any traditional or even perceptually apparent sense because … the physical environment of the city nurtures." 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 it had been like the floodgates of the city opened. Those three magic makers, those angels in fashionable clothing, had sprinkled their Dutch pixie dust all over me and now I was richer than all the leprechauns of Ireland.
I was being exceptionally honest with myself that morning and I acknowledged that shrooms had played an equal role in opening up opportunities. And I finally gave myself credit for using the opportunities in such a way that sitting at that cold sidewalk bench while watching the wind was as fulfilling as anything else I could have been doing.
