The Inaugural Post – Coachella 2007

I recently attended my second Coachella this year with a large group of very close friends.

We had an eye-opening experience.

Despite the incredible time I had with a smaller group last year, I still was not prepared for the intensity of emotion that accompanies such a profound experience as Coachella. While you’re there, time takes a much more ethereal quality, passing in massive yet hardly distinguishable lumps of fun. One thing is certain though: you feel an undeniable closeness with those sharing the experience with you.

This closeness highlights the sharp contrast of life within the Coachellaverse, and that which one escapes while there. Last year was followed by a huge letdown as well, but the cause was less complex; the contrast of being at Coachella to coming back to “reality” was shockingly unbearable. Comparable to that of coming back from a two week vacation.

Obviously that is a component this year, but the reason goes deeper this time. What is even sharper now is the contrast between peoples’ personalities in a free setting to when we are all bogged down during the week with work and all of the other stresses associated with making it through life on a daily basis.

It goes to show that we have to adopt certain barriers and attitudes just to make it through most weeks and that a regular weekend typically isn’t enough to shed those self-imposed obstructions and truly let loose. It takes something as monumentally primal as Coachella to snap everyone out of the working life daze. To show us that entire alternate worlds can exist for a brief period of time where we let down our guards and return to the pure, untainted form of our personalities that much more closely resemble who and what we were as a child or teenager.

When weren’t carrying so much weight on our shoulders.

I mentioned to my wife how when one walks around a public place during a work week, the world is not filled with people. Instead, shells pass you by dressed in business attire, making their way through the knee-deep sludge of a Monday. Compare that to walking through the crowds at Coachella and I was shocked at how many people I saw. Everyone is dressed exactly how they want to be and is acting exactly how they want to act, with no inhibitions.

I think it’s best exemplified in that one friend and I both returned to work on the same floor of the same building the following Tuesday and hardly spoke to each other. I missed hanging out with him in the context of the concert as much as I did two friends who I’ve known since middle school and who flew in just for the show.

Societal barriers can be just as affecting as physical ones, sometimes even more so. That all forms of barriers are shattered is one of the most amazing powers that Coachella has over a group of people, regardless of the make-up.

Calling this an emotional hangover does the whole experience an injustice because for a brief period of time, it is truly eye-opening, and that just doesn’t equate to the dulled sense one experiences with an alcohol hangover. This is much more profound. After Coachella last year is when I seriously began to question the entire path of my career and my life and now I am leaving corporate USA and going back to school. Can this be attributed to the concert? Probably not entirely, but it was definitely a huge catalyst. Sometimes that’s all you need.

The whole experience was all of three days. Short-lived by any account, but it has staying power – a lasting impact in terms of the obsessive thoughts it triggers in everyone who attends. On its most fundamental level, Coachella is a necessary reminder of the potential life has and the levels of spiritual freedom we are capable of achieving, even as the world passes us by through the blurry goggles of adulthood.

*Flickr photostream can be found here.

~ by CK on Sunday - May 6, 2007.