Meir Kalmansan is conducting a social experiment that seeks to break through the big city blues and connect with isolated New Yorkers. How? By giving unsuspecting strangers high-fives.
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As a New York Times movie review recently observed, “[w]e never seem more alone, more adrift from one another, than when we are bustling along in impromptu crowds, migratory flocks of isolated souls.” That’s every day in New York. The drudgery of crowds, walking the street, riding the subway, hailing yellow cabs.
But not today. Today, Meir Kalmansan is conducting his own social experiment that seeks to break through the big city blues and to connect with isolated New Yorkers. How?
Kalmansan is giving New York a high-five.
The Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn native has been skipping through New York City giving high-fives to unsuspecting New Yorkers, whose arms are outstretched as they are trying to hail a taxi. His hilariously quirky video, “High Five New York,” is both joyful and poignant. One the one hand, it’s completely silly. At the same time it shows how small (silly) acts can lift the wall between strangers.
As Kalmansan explains, he was trying to provide lighthearted human connection:
Especially when they’re getting a taxi they’re just there [thinking] nothing about anything else. They’re not even in the present they’re in the future just trying to get a taxi. So [I try] to bring them back to the now, to the moment and giving them a high-five. In a world of electronics, cellphones and all that jazz – which is great – we’re getting so caught up in, sometimes its great to have human connection.
Check out the video above. You will feel good. You will smile. You will feel more connected to your fellow man; less alone inside.
It might just be the best minute and twenty-four seconds of your day.
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(Photo Credit: YouTube! video screen capture)
I love this guy.