I can’t wait for simple, thronging normality once again

As Margaret Atwood once wrote, “Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew – you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour.” Bring it on. Picture: Alex Coppel.

I want to unlearn cautiousness. Wrap curiosity in my arms. Tip back my head and gulp the world. My arrested life is now, and living anonymous among a crowd is craved. I’m hungry as the world opens up but for us. Yet still we must wait, and wait. Now I just want to go macro instead of micro. Revel in the anonymity of the masses, the wonder of humanity en masse. Want normality with certainty, a maskless normality. Miss the language of smiles in public. The throng, the theatre, the stadium, the arena.

This pandemic has made me love humans again. What we do, what we create, how we can hold a crowd spellbound by our sport and art; how we conjure wonder. I was becoming short with my fellow species in the Before Times, weary of the aggressiveness, the shortness of temper, the thrust of the selfishness; the refusal to listen and create space for others. Now I just want to immerse myself in people again, immerse myself in life.

Samuel Johnson declared, “I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.” Yes. Because a crowd brings you out of yourself as it veers your focus to everyone else. The glee in returning to the communal sanctity of a darkened theatre, a stadium’s chant, the voices in full song challenging the ceiling in a church. Humans are so very good at creating beauty for the masses. As Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor said, “Live interaction with a crowd is a cathartic, spiritual kind of exchange.” I yearn for communal beauty now.

Can sniff the wings of freedom as I talk to mates overseas. They’re in a different world to us; their kids take daily Covid tests with results in half an hour. If positive, schools send them packing. Home testing kits are at the ready. This is their new Covid normal and we in Australia suddenly seem stuck in a different, creakier realm.

I recently queued for my jab at the site of the Sydney Olympics. The hours-long wait was good-natured, patient and appreciative of the staff doing their job. We all wanted this. Doing it for the nation, doing it for us. There’s a hunger for the old-fashioned normality of the messy, mingling pre-Covid throng once again. As Margaret Atwood once wrote, “Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew – you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour.” Bring it on.

I’m so sick of the sterility of Zoom lectures and tutorials for all the young people in tertiary institutions right now, my two sons included. This time in their lives is about growing up among a crowd of like-minded souls, about mingling and messing up and making mistakes, getting drunk at parties and sleeping with the wrong people and getting into mischief and learning so much from it all, about growing socially as well as mentally and finding your tribe and revelling in the best years of your life. It’s not about sitting alone in your bedroom in front of your screen.

CS Lewis once described the unnerving sensation of existing in a town devoid of people: “I never met anyone. But for the little crowd at the bus stop, the whole town seemed to be empty. I think that was why I attached myself to the queue.” We gravitate to the solace of a crowd. Want our human-constructed spaces filled.

My favourite crowd is the one at the exit barrier of an airport’s international arrivals hall. Oh, for the deliciousness of that once again. All the joy, surprise, relief, exhilaration, tears – and love, most of all, in all its iterations. Humans can be so beautiful. I can’t wait for simple, thronging normality once again. To be moved by it, and to never again take it for granted. The pandemic has taught me that we’re social animals, vulnerably gravitating towards our species as if afraid of a world without each other.