I Try to Stay Away from Crowds

On New Year's Eve, someone in my cycling group chat suddenly asked where everyone was celebrating. I replied that I've never gone out on that night. It's true. As far as I can remember, I've never gone anywhere with huge crowds on New Year's Eve. In the ten-plus years I lived in Chongqing, every New Year's Eve, Jiefangbei was packed with eager crowds. They gathered in the streets, waiting for the bell, hoping for a fresh start. I know full well that what shines in their eyes is hope for a better future. But to me, it's just a suffocating wall of packed bodies. Once I'm caught in it, breathing gets hard, an instinctive sense of danger instantly overwhelms the holiday joy, and I feel deeply uneasy. The time that stuck with me most was a company annual party. A colleague from Shanghai wanted to go to Hongyadong for a photo. I didn't want to be rude, so I went along. When we got there, the crowding was way past what "shoulder to shoulder" can describe. It was a human tide. Tourists dressed to the nines, photographers holding up fill lights, salespeople weaving through the gaps, everyone mixed together. I felt uncomfortable all over, like a fish that had wandered onto dry land. My colleague and I struggled through the stream of people and finally squeezed our way under the three glowing characters of the sign. Click. The photo was taken. In the picture, he's flashing a peace sign with the dazzling sign above him, surrounded entirely by strangers' faces. Honestly, I don't understand the point of photos like that. Unless you hold the phone really close, you can't even tell whether the subject of the photo is the person or the oppressive crowd. That awful feeling meant I couldn't stay long. Before long, I dragged my colleague onto a bus heading to the subway station, and we fled the scene. These days, I habitually avoid any crowded place. I've always felt that overly dense crowds hide risks no one can control. That's why I prefer cycling, photography, and hiking. These hobbies keep me relatively far from the noise. Of course, everything you do carries some risk. The difference is that when I choose to hike or ride, I'm willingly taking on the risk for the sake of a unique experience. But when I'm stuck in an aimless, crowded tide of people, besides passively taking on the danger, I don't know what I get out of it. Maybe I'm just someone who was born not liking the hustle and bustle. But not liking the hustle and bustle doesn't mean I don't want to take part in the world. There are many ways to embrace society. Stuffing myself into a packed crowd is exactly the way I'm least able to sense the world and least able to make a real connection with it. This New Year's Eve, I stayed home alone and rewatched The Greatest Showman late at night. I rang in the new year to the joyful song "The Greatest Show." It put me in a good mood and filled me with hope for the future, and it was every bit as good as being part of a crowd. So when the next holiday comes and you can't find me in the bustling city center, don't be surprised. I might be riding on an empty road, or sitting alone on a windy mountaintop. There's no countdown rising and falling there, only the wind whistling past my ears. That's my very own holiday music. In this noisy era, staying true to how you feel and choosing a way of being that lets you stretch out is a rare kind of celebration in itself. How about you? On this New Year's Eve that just passed, did you embrace the excitement in a sea of people, or enjoy the quiet on your own? Either way, as long as it's what your heart wanted, it's worth writing down.