The moment you stop deciding where your feet go.

It's a specific moment and you can feel it arrive. You're walking. Then you're walking with people, close, adjusting. Then there's a step, one particular step, where your foot goes down in a place you didn't choose because the choice was made by a hip to your left and a shoulder to your right and a slow tide from somewhere behind, and you notice that you did not choose it, and you notice that it was fine.

There's the border. On one side you're a person in a crowd. On the other side you're crowd.

Losing it

The word for it, in the older sense, is losing yourself, and I want to be honest that for me this has almost always been a relief.

I'm not a natural joiner. I stand at the edge of things. But I've been in the middle of a few, a stadium, a march, a station at rush hour after a delay, a floor at a show, and each time there was a point where the effort of being a separate thing just stopped. Nobody was asking me to decide anything. The decision had been distributed across ten thousand bodies and my share of it was so small that it rounded to zero. I was carried. I was, for a while, not responsible.

It's the closest I've come to what I imagine people mean by faith.

Singing

There's a version of this that people pay for, and it's the moment at a concert when the band stops and twenty thousand people sing the chorus.

I've done it. You don't decide to. Your mouth opens because the mouths around you have opened and there's a sound coming out that isn't your voice, it's a voice, one voice, and you're somewhere inside it. You can't hear yourself. That's the point. For the length of a chorus you aren't a person who sings badly. You're a building that's singing.

People cry at this. I have cried at this. Not from the song. From the size of the thing they briefly belonged to, and from the knowledge, already present in the crying, that it would end when the song did.

The animal

Protests are different because the crowd has somewhere to be, and a crowd that has somewhere to be is an animal.

You feel it decide. That's the only way I can describe it. A march comes to an intersection and nobody is in charge, there are people with megaphones but they aren't in charge, and the mass of it pauses and considers and then goes left, and you go left, and you couldn't tell anyone why. There was a lean. The lean became a turn. Somebody at the front started walking and the fact that they started spread backward as permission.

It's a very old feeling and I don't entirely trust it. The same animal that turns left at an intersection turns on a shop window. I've never been in one that did, but I have felt the animal think about it, felt the mood tighten across a block of people the way a muscle does, and understood that whatever I personally believed about shop windows wasn't going to be consulted.

The turn

Which brings me to the other thing, the thing that's also a crowd.

I have only been near it once. A platform, a delay, too many people, a train door that opened onto a car that was already full. The tide from behind kept coming because the people at the back couldn't see. And there was a moment, a real one, when the pressure on my chest went from "close" to "I can't get a full breath," and the relief of not being responsible turned instantly into something else. Not fear exactly. More like a door closing. The animal that had been carrying me was now standing on me, and it didn't know, and there was no one to tell.

It lasted maybe thirty seconds. The doors closed, the train left, the pressure dropped. Nobody was hurt. I got the next one and stood by the window and shook a little.

What stayed with me was how close the two states were. The singing and the door closing. Both are the same surrender. Both are the same loss of the feet. The difference isn't in you. You're the same thing in both, a small soft part of a larger body. The difference is entirely in whether the larger body has somewhere to go.

The small ones

I've been writing about big crowds, but the thing happens at any size, and I think the small version is where I actually learned it.

A dinner table with eight people that suddenly, without anyone deciding, becomes one conversation instead of three. A dance floor at a wedding at the moment the aunts get up. A kitchen at a party at one in the morning when everyone has drifted in and nobody is leaving. There's a click. You can feel the room turn from a set of people into a thing. And you stop being a person at the table and become part of the table, and the table is laughing, and you are laughing because it is.

These are crowds too. They have the same surrender and the same feet. They just don't have the door, or they have a very small one, which is why they're where you learn to let go before you try it with twenty thousand.

I think about the dinner table when I think about the stadium. Same animal. Same lean. The stadium is just the table with the volume up and the exits farther away.

Becoming one, on purpose

I still go into crowds. I go into them more than I used to, actually. Because being a person all the time is exhausting, and that the crowd is one of the few places you're permitted to put it down. A church does it. A choir does it. A good dance floor does it. The march does it, and the stadium does it, and for a few minutes you aren't a self with a history and a bank balance and an inbox. You're a step that gets taken. You're a note in a chord.

And I go in knowing about the door. Those are the terms. You put down your feet, and you accept that whoever picks them up might not know where they're going. Most of the time they do. Most of the time it's a chorus.

You just remember, at the edge, before you go in, which way the exits are. Then you let go.