If you've been watching YouTube longer than a year, you've heard of the "Where The Hell Is Matt?" meme (which also made it into this Barenaked Ladies video). This one guy, Matt Harding, goes around the world and films himself doing a silly dance in every single place he visits. This started few years ago, after which the Stride Gum company started sponsoring his trips. Opportunistic of him? Maybe, maybe not. But if a bubble gum company paid me money to travel the world and all I had to do was shill for 'em and do silly dances with the locals, I'd do it! I love traveling. And if I showed them my silly dance, maybe they'd even show me their far less silly ones?
In this latest video, crowds in almost all of 42 different countries bum rush the scene and dance with Matt. I'm a little embarrassed to admit, because it is a silly video, that I actually started tearing up somewhere between Tokyo and Austin. I don't know why! Maybe the combination of the music, the sheer silliness, plus the exact same type of joy being shared by everyone who started dancing with this fella. And then of course I started laughing again around Munich.
In case you were wondering, the music is the Bengali poem "Praan" (Stream of Life), from Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali (Song Offerings), translated by the author, set to song.
Stream of Life
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
