You’re not supposed to work on Easter Monday, but if you choose to do so anyway and venture to your favorite Starbucks along the way, you might find yourself crossing a 30-meter-wide road that leads from a popular historic square right in the heart of your city all the way to its northernmost fringes several kilometers away.
Unlike every other time of every other day, however, you notice you don’t have to wait before you cross. For once, you can just start walking, because, and this is rather unheard of, there just aren’t any cars. Zero. None.
No cabs transporting busy businessmen to and fro. No Saturday show-offs squealing their tuned cars’ tires as they blast down the avenue. No cyclists zigzagging between the commuters, causing honk after honk in five-minute intervals. Today, there is just silence — and when that hits you, you stop dead in your tracks — and the middle of the road.
You look around. You feel a bit uneasy. This isn’t supposed to be possible, let alone easy, but today, for whatever reason, it is both. You relax a little bit. You enjoy the moment, if only for a few seconds. And before you fully cross to the other side, you take a picture with your phone you couldn’t take on any other day: a vertical, long shot into the distance, showing a peaceful, endless boulevard under the blanket of a grey morning sky.
Sometimes, it pays to be in the wrong place at the right time. “Ordinary” is a choice like any other — and even if you don’t know where the road will lead, remember to step out of it from time to time.