Are you raining Praise today?

Strange is human nature-if someone praises us, they are sensible and a good judge of character. If they acclaim our contemporaries-what flattery and hogwash! One person saying nice things about my posts, I deem it as truthful, judicious awareness and the same person commenting generously on someone else’s mediocre blog is what I see as motivation by reader’s pressure. Yes, glints of narcissism are not always apparent.

It is as natural as breathing to believe nice things being said about us. We can be lulled into almost anything while listening to those earnest words which our mind signals to us as a craving we deserve. We want the world to borrow our eyes to see us like we do and borrow our mind to think the same too. We don’t want perspectives, we want garbed approvals.

It would be almost impossible to find someone who totally hates himself. Self love is the first love and like they say, the first love is the hardest to give up. So when someone fans this fire, it spreads faster than blood does in the veins. It takes us to a whole new echelon of enthusiasm within the frame of our skin and delicate layers of deliberation within.

Praise is not beyond us even if we are not one of those who are beyond praise. An act of appreciation affirms our connection to each other-validates us, expands who we are in this world. Even a little bit of a positive reception goes a long way to ensure action that may otherwise be postponed or crushed under the farce of monotony or disinclination.

It is a universally occurring phenomenon. Even those who profess to be above it are really somewhere lingering around its fringes waiting to be enticed by potent and believable enough bait. It is the marijuana of success, a vicious circle wherein enough is never enough and more leads to a wish for an encore.

The intellectuals to the retards, the artistic to the vulgar, the man on the chair to the man on the street, everyone’s looking to be considered special-every ordinary human motivated to be derived as inspiringly extraordinary or at least rare, whether they admit it or not, to a greater degree or less. And when someone gives that to us-we raise them to a pedestal just as they raise us to some altar in our minds.

Praise is often intoxicating. Watch someone who has left footprints on some soil, worth his mettle. See him bask in his own glory, drench in public adulation and tread only in hunger for greater applause. It is then that a dip in appeal occurs-for he alters to live now to please others who loved him in the first place for loving himself as he was.

Praise can balance you just as much as it has the potent power of turning you giddy. It is often misleading-it plays games of hallucination and you begin to imagine materialization of thoughts that were hitherto latent. It evokes desire and the drive. Whether it is positive or negative depends on its provocation and how much you allow it to go to your head and eventually the rest of the systems follow suit. 

The only weapon safeguarding us against this lethal attack would be the armour of discretion-being able to realize when and who is genuine and what is being said merely to ensure a reservation in the good books. Someone somewhere is always trying to get into your books-whether or not you happen to be sitting with an open or inviting one, it does not matter.

We live not for ourselves but for the redemption of how we should be. We want praise for we want to know we are not being discarded like the chaff at the flour mill of life that is grinding us mercilessly. So let's accept what we subconsciously plea to the world-as you rotate the blades of this machine, by kind to grind me to a fine powder that satiates not just your hunger but also makes me feel fulfilled in a life well lived.