Choices, Love, Cola And All That Jazz

You would readily agree with me when I say that there are things which you can choose while there are others which fall outside the realm of choices and make you despair. Like, you can order and get delivered at your doorstep, the pizza you want but can't choose the courier who delivers it! You can choose the airlines you want to fly but not the stewardess on board, let alone the pilot. Why, you can't even choose, at least not always, the passenger sitting next to you! It is always that genial and not-particularly-thin slob whose penchant for a non-stop friendly conversation is as disconcerting as the snore that he belts out while he pauses only to sleep. It would appear for all intents and purposes that your favourite airlines has a panel of such charming company to readily offer their unsuspecting customers. You can choose your bermudas with your favourite geometrical designs printed on them but not a Bermuda Square or a Bermuda Rectangle in lieu of the Bermuda Triangle! You can choose the fragrance which you love but not your own nose. Not unless you want to go under the knife! That your post-op nose is not unlikely to, at the end of the fabulous sum you end up coughing up or the attendant traumatic experience, fall off altogether, when least expected, like it happened with MJ, is another matter!

On a slightly more serious level, you can choose the person you want to marry but not your mom-in-law. Why, for that matter, there is no choosing your own parents or children. You can do the nitpicking and choose your profession but not your customers or competitors. And the boss! What kind of a factory, I often wonder, churns out such an exclusive specimen of fault-finders par excellence and slave drivers as bosses get to be as a community, and consider themselves God's gift to humanity notwithstanding the utter bereftness of humanism in them!

Another category of people who defy choices is neighbours. You can't choose them any more than the birth mark on your bottom. They are a pre-ordained fact of life, take it or leave it. In this age of exploding population and shrinking spaces in the modern city life, they are a part of the package that comes with the apartment that you manage to acquire with your lifetime's savings. Surely, you could choose the neighbourhood you want to live in, by carefully eliminating those which have a certain disrepute, notoriety or infamy, firmly attached to their names with the tenacity of a flea on a dog's back. But, individual neighbours? Nah! I didn't think so, too. They come in all shapes and sizes, from all kinds of religious and cultural backgrounds, ethnicity, value and belief systems, peculiar whims and fancies, unbearable likes and unheard of dislikes!

And the good Lord has enjoined us to love our neighbours. If everyone loves his neighbour, regardless of his or her shape, size or gender, oodles of love would be passed on to one and all right down to the last person in the line. The world would then end up smelling like a rose. And that is not what is happening now! Apparently, the grimace on the face of the last fellow down the line would suggest that he is not getting his daily dose of love from his neighbour. Now, wait! There is something wrong with that logic.

Everybody is capable of giving and receiving love. If somebody doesn't like his neighbour, surely it is not because he is not capable of loving. It could be because he thinks that his neighbour is not worth his love. How could you possibly love, say, a boorish fellow who is uncouth and a slouch, or, for that matter, a slovenly lady who reminds you of a Dolly Parton gone wrong, simply because he or she is your neighbour?Why not love someone of your choice, like the lovely lady you ran into the other day at the coffee shop? Elementary, my dear friend. It is again a matter of choices. While you choose the gorgeous lady for lavishing your love on, you had, perhaps, overlooked the probability of her being endowed with, besides the flaunt-in-the-face assets, a filthy rich balding and jealous husband with a benevolent beer belly, or a vicious and mean sugar daddy of the unsavoury type, that circulates in the proverbial underworld, neither of whom would be favourably inclined to allow you to share oxygen with the object of your choice. Still worse, it is quite likely that there is a boyfriend, looking like a Roman God, lurking in the background, in front of whom no one else counts for the o. of your c.!

An impasse! You ran into a brick wall! What do you do? Climb it, break it down or beat a retreat? Lose your life or limbs, fighting for the love of a female whom you don't know from eve? While your grumpy neighbour has been waiting for eons for your brotherly kiss of love to infuse magic into his or her system which would transform him or her into a prince or princess that he or she really is under his or her coarse exterior, you would risk everything in the course of wooing a girl who sees through you every time she looks at you? For all you know, she may be one of those emancipated type of women who just don't care for men or someone with a totally different kind of sexual orientation for your liking. Or, maybe, she is just a regular kind of girl enjoying multiple choices in the form of numerous suitors, everyone leagues ahead of you in the race for her affection.

What is worth remembering is that what you give comes back to you, maybe in a roundabout way. It is quite likely that your brotherly or neighbourly love for the faceless guy or dame next door is sure to find its way to you in a different form from a different quarter. Like the femme fatale in the coffee shop seeing a certain something in you which makes her take an inexplicable liking for you on a sudden impulse and starting a seemingly innocuous conversation which gradually metamorphoses into a beautiful friendship and eventually a roaring romance!

It has been famously said that love is blind. Nobody knows what makes love between any two persons tick. So, love thy neighbour regardless of that person's qualifications or qualities or the complete lack of them. In any case, love, you must. For, love has its own rewards and keeps the world going. The more love you give, the more you get in return. No one really knows why it is so or how it works. Besides, life without love is flat, like a tepid cola, with all that makes it endearing, gone with the fizz. So, begin with your neighbour and let the whole world be inundated by your love! You would soon find yourself living in a rose garden!