Working with dogs a lot these past few months, I got really really into the habit of lavishing verbal praise on them. It’s partly a practical thing: it’s easier to communicate to an animal that the current behavior they are displaying is favorable and encouraged than it is to communicate to them exactly what is wrong about another set of behaviors. Dogs are funny, because if you punish them for too long for a misdeed, they quickly forget what it was that they did wrong. That’s not to say there’s no appropriate time or methods for disciplining an animal, because there certainly are. But some things just work better. Like praise. If I had a nickel for every time I said “good dog” or used a nice tone of voice to express to one of the dogs that they were doing something right and that I loved them… well, I’d have a lot of nickels.

I was thinking about this whole thing a bit recently over the weekend, while juggling in the streets at the Sowebo Festival: how nice it is, and how rare it is to be praised in day to day life by other people for things that you have done or are doing. Most good deeds (especially the best ones) go either unnoticed or unrewarded (except maybe karmically - if you’re into that) and you just have to keep on keeping on with something because you know it’s the right thing to do. While I was juggling though, people kept saying nice things, kept praising what I was doing, kept smiling. And it just gave me a good feeling and inspired in me a desire to take that habit of verbally praising other people and bring it into ordinary life, because I think we all need it on some level: we need to know that what we’re doing is right and good and we need to have the knowledge that we have the support of others and of a community. It’s one of the cornerstones - I think - of being a fully-functioning human being.