the mardi gras spirit
Mardi Gras is my favorite time of year in my favorite place. I want more of the spirit of this in the rest of the year. I even want it at work.
The “Christmas spirit” is a certain generosity and cheerfulness. Kind of quaint and snowbound and unchanging. Mardi Gras is different. It’s excessive; it’s fat (by name). It’s in rolling conversation with itself, which is to say that the people celebrating it are in conversation with the past, with the choices of people who celebrated it last year and in 2001 and 1967 and way before. When you see pictures of Mardi Gras in New Orleans from 50 years ago, you recognize it right away, almost without a sense of elapsed time. It has been weird and joyful and lascivious and friendly for a long time (although I won't gloss the fact that it was also for a very long time explicitly racist and segregated - it’s a human, American, Southern thing and it therefore has human, American, Southern history and violence in its story).
Some of the best of it is seeing thousands of people suddenly turned into artists and actors. They make costumes at home and they become characters for the day. There’s the assertion of self (and selves) that comes with almost any art making I can think of. But there isn’t the self-consciousness of a writer’s workshop or a dance class. There is no teacher who holds a central place of authority and the posture of your peers is not one of critique. The stage you’re on is egalitarian. That stage only works if it’s populous. One person can be a performer. One person cannot be a parade. This is a day (and a season) of parades.
In the most exciting and effective places I have worked, this Mardi Gras spirit swirls through the same mundane structures everyone else seems stuck with (zoom calls, meetings, spreadsheets, socials etc etc). Teammates make use of (and make fun of) hierarchies and roles. Intersections are celebratory, not transactional. People create stuff and offer it up to others and they shimmy beyond what they’ve already mastered into what might be. They do this because a) they enjoy it and b) that’s what we do around here. And part of why they enjoy it is it’s what we do around here.
Come do this with us. Take the streets on Tuesday. Make stuff, don’t be a jerk, let yourself be dazzled. The point isn’t looking good (although we do look good!) - it’s looking like you care more about being a part of it, contributing yourself to it, than looking good.
-eric
