February 11, 2025

Crowded Rooms Full of Happy People Doing Inconsequential Things

My most recent ENTHUSIASMS newsletter went out this morning without caveats or apologies for enthusing at a moment when so many things in the world are terrible, for the simple reason that enthusing is one of my deliberate non-reactive responses to “all this,” along with another of my great pleasures lately: gathering in crowded rooms with happy people taking part in activities of little consequence.

Gathering in crowded rooms with happy people taking part in activities of little consequence, to me, is not just an antidote to our precarious current moment, but also to the last five years, during which crowded rooms and crowds in general have often felt threatening, sometimes enough to put me off people in general, contempt breeding contempt. But I can’t have that, because it only turns me into a monster, a mirror image of the forces I rise against, so instead, I am reacquainting myself with community and connection, all the while also bringing a fresh awareness of boundaries that I didn’t used to have, which previously made things like community and connection into an awful kind of trap. (Other people are not required to love me. WHO KNEW? And I don’t have to love everyone: ALSO TOTALLY FINE. WHAAA?)

All this is not to denigrate gatherings of people taking part in activities of GREAT consequence (for example, we have an election coming up on Ontario at the end of this month; make sure you’re registered to vote!) but I actually think these inconsequential activities matter just as much. (It matters too for me not to be gathering in rooms crowded with angry people. Rage is not the fuel I need right now, and this world has enough of it already.)

So I’ve been working hard at showing up, at gatherings large and small. I’ve been inviting my neighbours for dinner and reaching out and making plans with friends I haven’t seen in too long. I’ve been making an effort to get out into the world, and be with people, even anonymously (sitting with a book and a cup of tea in a crowded cafe) to repair the tears in my own sense of the social fabric, which can’t help but go some way towards repairing that sense in others, even though I’m not even responsible for that. I’m really only responsible for me, and knowing that makes the entire project so much easier.

I want to live in a world where I trust people, where I welcome people, where I can have thoughtful disagreements with people, where I learn from people, where I am content to let people think otherwise, where I can be wrong, where other people can be wrong, where there is room enough for all kinds of different voices in all kinds of different keys.

Often literally—I’ve been in rooms singing along with strangers in a variety of different contexts lately, and I love this, that we’re making harmony, which is pretty much our job here as beings on this planet earth. But in more abstract ways as well—even riding the subway, I look around and consider what a miracle this arrangement is, all of us together, strangers in a tin can hurtling through the darkness, minding each other’s business, even ignoring each other, which is an undervalued part of city life, if you ask me.

You be you, and I’ll be me, which is also a kind of mercy.