BENGALURU: Had anyone ever told you that you are capable of incredible, wondrous magic? Would you believe it if they do? A social experiment some time ago tried to check on the hypothesis that if someone was told they are beautiful and worthy of love, they would brighten up and smile, as if a child recognising something magical for the first time. The person conducting the experiment stopped everyday people going about their business and told them things like, “You are looking awesome today!” Or, “Has anyone told you how wonderful your hair is?” These were regular people that the researcher met, not professionals for whom how they looked or behaved, just ordinary folk, and their life brightened up for that day, or atleast those few minutes.
If a stranger saying such things brightened up that person’s life even if for just a little while, imagine what it would be like for the person to receive such wonderful compliments from someone they love. Each and every time a loved one notices us, really sees us, and tells us something special about us at that time, it is just magical. Most times though, when we have lived with someone we have loved for a while, what we notice and bring to the loved one’s attention are not the beautiful things, the little cute things that they do or the quirks that make them who they are.
What we end up bringing attention to are the irritants. It is not the pretty things but the petty things that we end up focusing on - the towel that is not spread out on the rod properly, the stain on the couch armrest where they put their head as they chill watching TV, the way they don’t fold the newspaper properly once done, the hair left uncleared in the bathroom sink.
The list of the irritants that one can notice becomes quite endless once you get to really know a person, and it very quickly overwhelms what is beautiful about that person. When that happens, the magic disappears quite quickly. Lovers who couldn’t keep their eyes off each other, if not their hands, don’t want to be around each other as much.
The distance between them grows. Where the thought of one, and the sight of them, would bring up a smile, there’s only indifference, or even a scowl of disgust. Love is magical. It has the power to brighten up not only one’s day but a whole lifetime. This is a magic we all have. We don’t have to go to any magical school or be an apprentice to some great wizard. Yet, we often forget it, like wizards who forget for a while that they can do magic just because they haven’t used those powers in a long time. Left unused, love too forgets it is magic. We need to practice love for us to know how to love. We need to practice love every day, for ourselves, for our loved ones and for the world at large.