So if one face is a flower, then a crowd is a veritable botanical garden.
I'm not overfond of crowds [2]: loud crowds, giant crowds, crowds in enclosed spaces, people in crowds touching me, crowds that are more like mobs, with group mentality taking over and the feelings (good or bad) mounting to unreasonable heights.
But large groups of people need not be "crowds", mobs chanting "Kill the beast!" and waving pitchforks. People en masse can be gardens, a delight to the senses, infinite variations on one beautiful theme.
Which is to say, I like people-watching.
People, on the whole, are fascinating. I love trying to puzzle out what somebody's story is just based on the type of shoes they're wearing and whether or not they're smiling. Is he in a hurry? Did she just get bad news? Why did she wear those shoes she can hardly walk in? What can possibly be in his backpack that's worth being bent double like a sapling in the wind? Why are they flying to Tokyo? Is their significant other in the military? the Peace Corps? Doctors without Borders? A thousand human dramas, widely varied and yet still so much the same.
Airports are prime spots for people-watching, trying to guess where people are going, who they're seeing, why they wore what they wore (be it pajamas and toting a pillow or high heels and a fur coat). Airports put people in-between, and it's utterly engrossing to see how individuals react when taken out of their routine, put in a more or less stressful situation, and forced to wait. Who watches the watchers? What books does he read? What game is she playing on her phone? Who does they text? Where does she sit? Such minutiae make up a life. Put all those lives together, and you have a flower garden of faces, a tapestry of stories, a forest of beautiful, messy humanity.
xo,
Devo
[1] Source of quote here; source of research here.
[2] It's very telling to this introvert that the French word "crazy; insane" is fou/folle, and the word for "crowd" is foule...remarkably similar, methinks.
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