It was easy to see that they were in love. My lips curved into a smile too and the world in that instant transformed into a wonderful, happy place where love had colored everything ‘beautiful’. The rain and the couple ahead had cleansed me of all negativity and misgivings. I suppose that’s what love, in the simplest of terms, can do. Love can make you happy.
Love Can Change Your Life Around
Love, it seems, has that effect on most of us. It not only brings hope and beauty in this otherwise chaotic world that we live in but also makes us feel meaningful and important. Love can make you happy. We are a world of six billion-plus; how inconsequential a solitary ‘I’ is in the face of this huge mass. Yet, in the eyes of the beloved and other loved ones, that one minuscule ‘I’ in the world becomes all-important and the inconsequentiality is rendered void. And so, true love is happiness. I was reading the memoirs of survivors of the Holocaust. Many wrote of how in the thoughts and memories of their precious ones, they could experience, even if for a few seconds, moments of happiness and pleasure in the otherwise unbearably oppressive life inside the walls of the concentration camps. Others confessed that stripped of all dignity, many often considered giving up all, but it was the hope of being reunited with their loved ones, which gave them the mental strength to hold on. Love gave their bodies and minds a reason to rise beyond their means. Finding love makes you stronger, beyond belief, beyond reason. ‘Love makes the world go round,’ wrote Ollie Jones in 1958, a song that was a major hit. As I was working on the numerous entries for the collection Chicken Soup for the Indian Romantic Soul, I saw that ‘love’ was not what just made the writers’ world go round, but often formed the foundation on which they built satisfying, happy and meaningful lives. It was this very ‘love’ that acted, time and again, as their safety net every time they fell flat while battling the vicissitudes and challenges posed by a highly competitive and fast-paced world. The security and support from their beloved gave them the strength and the much-needed succor to stand their ground. Love makes us stronger than we are. Love can make you happy. Love can transform the commonplace into beauty and splendor. Love is the source of much creativity and, in its intoxicating folds, we ordinary humans can experience eternity. All through the ages, we’ve heard of the magical power of love and its impact upon our minds and lives. We have all too often known love to be our blessing and our savior. And yet, consciously or unknowingly, we keep this treasure at bay! Why are we always trying to find reasons to give up on love, to stop believing in its goodness, its madness? I once attended a workshop of a famed spiritual guru. He shared with us the results of a survey in which six hundred people on their deathbeds from all sections of life were asked about their three biggest regrets in life. The most common regret was that they had not told their significant others (which included not only their spouses, children and parents but also friends, colleagues and extended families) how much they were loved and valued. And to the select few that they did tell, it was not often enough. We were then asked to draw up our list of people whom we would have liked to convey our love to and also the reason behind it, supposing it was our last day on earth. We were also asked to mention the reason for inaction. As my list of people and reasons emerged, I was gripped by a conflicting sense of joy and sorrow. Joy, because I was blessed to have the people I had in my life, people I loved and received love back from; sorrow because many in that list perhaps did not even know what they meant to me! My excuses that emerged for not telling them appeared trivial: ego, timidity, fear of being judged as an emotional fool, indolence and at times the thought of, “what if I was taken ‘otherwise’.” These reasons seemed very unimportant when set against the irrevocability of death. In the end, love makes you realize what is truly important. And yet even today I tend to forget that lesson from the spiritual guru and expend my energy and time on all that is unlovable. Despite everything, love persists. Love will make you happy, it will make you ache, make you feel. And that day, I felt. And thanks to that day, I still feel. Outside, as if to remind me, nature celebrates the meeting of earth and sky in myriad hues, peacocks dance to call their mates, squirrels chase each other in playful love, flowers bloom to speak of their lovers, and I keep my softer emotions under wraps because…
