The Illusion and the Real

 

The previous post made me delve deeper into my search of the meaning of the word ‘Love’. It made me question its existence and our perception of it. No, don’t give me those prying looks; I am not ‘in love’ (even if a series of posts on 'it' might suggest otherwise). For understanding an emotion you have to be out of it. Like how you have to be calm yourself to understand what anger is! I know it’s such a cliché and overdone subject (love, what else?) but still we can’t get enough of it (and we don’t grow sick of it either!).

Maybe I am tad late in my realization but it recently occurred to me—How we end up loving the ‘illusion’ of people instead of the ‘real’ people. Everything seems sunny, till your rose coloured glasses are on. Once, you start seeing outside them, things start to get stormy. Our visual or rather mental image of our ‘object of affection’ is way different from the real-life them. When reality strikes you feel deceived (not by them but by your own sense of judgment).

In one of my recent chats with my friend Sreejith, where I was griping about the fact that I don’t understand this thing called love. Not much to my surprise he answered saying— “Mankind is made of love, also in its distorted forms. You can’t live life without loving something or the other”. Agreed that we end up loving somebody or the other at every point in our life. But there are these times when you don’t feel so affectionate and hence feel ‘unloved’ in return and it works vice versa too.  

For once I would like to concur with how Meg Ryan (as Kate) describes ‘Love’ in the movie Kate and Leopold—“ You can’t live a fairy tale…. The whole love thing is just a grown up version of Santa Claus, a myth that we confect since childhood.” As I perceive it she refers to the ‘romantic’ love here. For ours is the generation raised on a good dosage of fairy tales since childhood. We grow up harboring this notion of ‘love’ and related stuff. That pretty much explains the culmination of many so-called ‘love-marriages’ in divorces.

How much ever we fight it or desire it, love is here to stay as it has always done. The genre may differ. It can vary from ‘selfless’, ‘motherly’, ‘parental’, ‘human’, ‘puppy’, ‘romantic’, ‘erotic’ and (not to forget) ‘unrequited’ etc etc. That’s precisely why more often than not (with some exception to times like the ‘present’!) I find myself humming – “ I can feel it in my fingers, I can feel it in my toes. Love is all around me….”.