Markus Anecdotes - A misty early morning

Written with Photos by Markus

It was one of those mornings that didn’t feel like anything at all.

No dramatic sunrise, no sense of urgency, no particular thought pressing at the front of my mind. Just a quiet, slightly grey sky hanging over the street, the kind of soft Dutch morning where the light never quite decides what it wants to be. I stepped outside, closed the door behind me, and for a moment just stood there, listening.

Nothing much.

A distant bicycle bell. The faint hum of a car somewhere far off. The soft rustle of wind moving through trees that never seem in a hurry.

Five minutes later, I was at the station.

That in itself still feels slightly unreal to me sometimes—that something as routine as getting to a train can be reduced to a five-minute walk. No planning, no calculating traffic, no buffer time built on anxiety. Just a short walk, a familiar path, the same corners, the same parked bikes, the same quiet rhythm repeating itself day after day.

At the platform, people were already there, spaced out in a way that always feels intentional but never enforced. No one stands too close. No one rushes to claim territory. Everyone simply exists in their own small bubble, coexisting without friction.

The train arrived exactly when it said it would.

Not in a spectacular way. Not with any sense of achievement. Just… as expected.

Doors opened. People stepped in. Some bring their bicycles. Others stepped out. No one pushed. No one tried to outmaneuver anyone else. There is a quiet understanding in these moments, something unspoken but deeply ingrained. You wait your turn. You move when it’s your time. And somehow, without anyone directing it, everything flows.

I found a seat by the window.

Outside, the landscape moved past in long, uninterrupted lines—flat fields, still water, occasional clusters of houses that looked as if they had been placed there carefully rather than grown organically. The sky stretched wide and low, pressing gently down on everything below.

It wasn’t particularly beautiful in the dramatic sense. There were no mountains, no striking colors, no postcard moments demanding attention.

But it was calm.

And that calm does something to you over time.

In other places, commuting feels like something you have to survive. It takes energy from you before your day even begins. Here, it feels almost like a transition space, a buffer between one part of your life and another. A place where your thoughts can settle, where nothing is demanding your attention all at once.

Even when things go wrong, they go wrong in a controlled way.

A delay, for example, is rarely chaos. It’s announced. Explained. Updated. There is always information, always a system behind the inconvenience. You may not like it, but you understand it. And that understanding removes a certain kind of stress—the kind that comes from not knowing what is happening or what to do next.

At some point, without noticing exactly when, I stopped preparing for things to fall apart.

That might sound like a small change, but it isn’t.

It changes how you carry yourself through the day.

After work, I stopped by the supermarket.

It was the same one I always go to, with the same layout that never changes. Fruits and vegetables on the right, bread further in, dairy along the back wall. Even without thinking, my body knows where to go. There is no wandering, no searching, no small frustrations adding up.

Everything is where it should be.

The aisles were clean, the lighting bright but not harsh. People moved quietly, picking up items, placing them into baskets, continuing on. No one blocked the way for long. No one turned a simple task into something complicated.

At the self-checkout, the rhythm is always the same.

Scan. Beep. Place item. Scan. Beep. Place item.

There is something strangely satisfying about it. The predictability, the small sense of control. You know exactly what to do, and the system responds exactly as expected. No surprises, no unnecessary interaction, no friction.

Even the waiting—if there is any—feels orderly. People stand at a distance. They don’t hover. They don’t rush you. You take your time, and no one makes you feel like you are taking too much of it.

It’s a small thing.

But small things, repeated every day, become something bigger.

Outside, it had started to rain.

Not heavily. Not dramatically. Just a steady, quiet rain that seemed less like weather and more like a background condition of life here. No one reacted strongly. No one ran for cover. People simply adjusted—zipped up jackets, lowered their heads slightly, and kept moving.

I walked home the same way I always do.

The same five minutes. The same streets. The same sense that nothing unexpected was going to happen.

And that’s when it occurred to me, not as a sudden realization, but as a quiet thought that had probably been forming for a long time:

This is luxury.

Not the kind that shows itself.

Not the kind that can be photographed or displayed or easily explained.

But the kind you feel in the absence of tension.

In many places, luxury is something extra—something above the baseline of life. Here, it feels like it has been built into the baseline itself.

It’s in the fact that you can rely on things.

That your day is not constantly at risk of being disrupted in unpredictable ways. That systems, even when imperfect, are consistent. That people, even when distant, are respectful of space and boundaries.

At first, that distance can feel cold.

No one talks to you unnecessarily. No one fills silence just to avoid it. Conversations are often direct, sometimes to the point where it feels uncomfortable if you’re not used to it.

But over time, that same distance starts to feel like something else.

Respect.

No one demands your attention. No one intrudes on your space. You are allowed to exist without constantly reacting to others.

Silence is not awkward here.

It’s just silence.

In the evenings, when I get home, the day doesn’t explode into something chaotic. It winds down.

There is a rhythm to it. A quiet transition from movement to stillness.

The light fades early in certain months, turning everything outside into soft shadows. Inside, it becomes warm, contained. The kind of warmth that doesn’t just come from heating, but from the feeling of being enclosed, protected from whatever is happening outside.

My dogs move around with the same familiarity as I do, following routines they probably understand better than I think. The cats occupy their chosen spaces, each one convinced that their spot is the best one in the house.

Nothing urgent is happening.

Nothing needs to be solved immediately.

And that, more than anything, is what stands out.

Life is not constantly demanding something from you.

It’s not pulling you in multiple directions at once. It’s not requiring you to react, adjust, adapt every second.

It allows you to exist at a steady pace.

That doesn’t mean everything is perfect.

Things break. Delays happen. Bureaucracy can be slow and sometimes frustrating. There are moments when the system feels too rigid, too structured, too unwilling to bend.

But even those frustrations exist within a framework that makes them manageable.

You know where you stand.

You know what the process is.

And that clarity removes a layer of stress that is hard to describe until you’ve experienced its absence.

Sometimes, I think about what it would feel like to suddenly lose this.

To wake up one day and step back into a place where nothing is certain, where every task requires negotiation, where simple things take energy not because they are difficult, but because they are unpredictable.

I think about how quickly I’ve adapted to this version of life.

How many things I now expect without even realizing it.

The train arriving on time.

The supermarket being organized.

The streets being clean.

People respecting space.

Systems working, even if not perfectly, at least consistently.

None of these feel extraordinary anymore.

They feel normal.

And that is exactly what makes them extraordinary.

Because when something becomes invisible, it’s usually because it has become reliable.

You stop noticing it not because it’s insignificant, but because it no longer demands your attention.

It supports you quietly, in the background.

On another morning, much like the first one, I stepped outside again.

The sky was the same soft grey. The air carried that familiar chill. The street looked unchanged, as if nothing had happened since the day before.

And in a way, nothing had.

No big events. No defining moments. No stories that would sound impressive if told out of context.

Just another day.

Another walk to the station. Another train. Another quiet sequence of predictable, uneventful moments.

And yet, moving through it, there was a sense of ease that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

Not happiness in the obvious sense.

Not excitement.

Just… ease.

The kind that sits underneath everything, unnoticed most of the time, but always there.

I didn’t think about it for long.

There was no need to.

The train arrived.

The doors opened.

And the day continued, exactly as expected.