We can do it if we want. We can enrich and beautiful our lives, at least some.
That article in Mind Hacks says that insincere compliments can still affect our feelings positively. I wrote I thought everyone on my blog mailing list was looking extra good this morning. My friend, a good poet and a man sensitive to humor and the odd twists and ironic turns of life immediately got into the game. He thanked me and ventured to compliment me on my dapper appearance today. Since we hadn't seen each other today, being about 1100 miles apart, we were both "making it up".
But that is the beauty of human life! We can make it up and once made up, something new exists. I have been told lots of things but I don't think "dapper" has ever been applied to me before. But still, short, out of fashion, a bit nerdy, well past the middle of life, damn if I am not a bit more dapper now than I was at breakfast. I have been told that experts at makeovers can work miracles. I read that Cindy Crawford said, "I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford", referring to the difference between what she looked like upon arising in the morning and after several hours of being made up and coiffed.
I read some of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and he described his disillusion with being the army in bitter terms of falling out of love in a marriage. I pitied the man who believed in the external qualities as verities. He was a very sharp writer and as such, he might have actually known love is created and enhanced by thought and purpose and action. It is a garden to be cultivated, made and re-made, not a range of mountains beyond human control.
Here's to compliments, skillful and imaginative flattery and accurate observation of the tiny bit of dapper in us all.
