A little while ago, I read a few books outlining the Gratitude Attitude. There was one point mentioned which intrigued me: it was absurd, fantastical and highly unlikely. It was called ‘Extreme Praise’. It’s an art – an extremely difficult one.
It is easy to be happy and thankful when things are breezy. It’s only slightly harder to hold on to that positiveness when the going is tough, but you can still see the end of the road.
Try doing it when everything sucks and irrevocable damage is done and see how you pull it off.
As practice, the writer put out a list of terrible scenarios and the reader (me) was supposed to find ways to be positive and praiseful in that situation. One scenario was something like this:
You’ve been working on a project for three months; researching, compiling, and editing. It’s a large scale endeavour and you’ve been working overtime for days. Just before you’ve completed it, the computer crashes and you lose everything: your research, work and drafts.
I skipped that one over, because I couldn’t think of anything and because it wasn’t something I was really bothered with. Just another bad thing.
Until that exact same ‘evil’ decided that it was going to pick me to take the Extreme Praise course.
As I’ve said, I want to be a bestseller novelist. I have been working on a novel since the beginning of this year. 269 A4 pages and more than 100’000 words long.
It was the only item on my pen drive that the virus infected.
Not 3 months of work: 8 months – spending every free moment typing; details jotted down on KFC napkins and in the back of old school notebooks; character profiles and geography research – gone up in a streaming series of numbers and gibberish alphabets.
The first thing I thought was: “you have got to be kidding….” It only took a few moments of scrolling through the document to see that it was very, very real. My second reaction was to seriously consider throwing the laptop off the balcony and continue destroying the household equipment until someone got my story back.
Just before I was able to reach the peak of panic, I remembered Extreme Praise. I was getting so near losing it, that I grasped it immediately. It helped, because the laptop is still in working condition and I’m thinking a little straighter.
Being praiseful, even right now, is hard as hell. However, even literary idiots like Edison were able to use Extreme Praise. When the poor guy’s workshop burnt down, taking with it loads of equipment and experimental data, he said “There goes all the mistakes. Thank God I can start over.”
So I’m going to say the same thing, and keep saying it as I retype those lost pages. “There goes all the mistakes: thank God I can do it better.”
Amandina Brook 