The Ridiculous Bumper Sticker That Matched My Ridiculous Gratitude

November 2024, middle school drop-off. The bumper sticker on the car ahead of me made me pause and made my morning.

It read...

HONK IF YOU HAVE TO POOP!

I laughed out loud. Hard.

The kind of laugh where you’re sitting alone in your car looking ridiculous, but you don’t care because something is genuinely funny.

I wanted to honk. But I didn’t actually have to poop at that exact moment, so I held back.

Then my brain did what my brain sometimes does.

Wait a minute. I may not have to poop RIGHT NOW… But I DO have to poop. I’m a human being. Eventually, it’s going to happen.

SO I CAN HONK!

Unfortunately, by the time I worked all of that out in my head, the car was gone.

I missed my chance. But I was still laughing. And somewhere in the middle of all that ridiculousness, I had another thought:

That’s something to be grateful for.

It Was Funny. AND Serious.

My youngest son has dealt with gastrointestinal issues since he was only a few months old.

For more than a decade, we’ve gone to surgery centers so doctors can monitor his digestive tract. In the earlier years, we were there multiple times a year.

We had actually been there about two weeks before I saw that bumper sticker. And during some of those visits over the years, I saw kids dealing with even more difficult situations.

Kids who couldn’t use the bathroom without assistance.

So while I was sitting in the school drop-off line laughing about pooping, my mind went there too. I thought about my son. I thought about those kids. And I realized something that sounds ridiculous until you really think about it:

Being able to poop independently is a blessing we usually overlook.

Multiple things were true. The bumper sticker was hilarious. AND it reminded me of something I genuinely appreciated.

So naturally…

I wrote a poem about poop.

Apparently My Family Recognizes Genius

The next day, I wrote a poem called Smile When You Poop and sent it to our family group chat.

Obviously, my family understood that they were witnessing an important literary moment. 🤪

I’ll let you read the whole poem at the end of the book.

And I don’t know if this is truthfully weird or weirdly truthful, but…

I was joking. AND I was serious.

I Had Already Been Practicing This

The bumper sticker didn’t make me start practicing gratitude.

I had already been doing that for years. A few years earlier, during the pandemic, I started taking long walks and intentionally noticing things I normally ignored.

Street signs. Trees. Things my body was doing without me telling it to. Random stuff helping me all day that I barely thought about.

At the time, I wasn’t sitting around trying to invent a gratitude system. I was just noticing. And eventually I started noticing ridiculously small things.

Then I started intentionally looking for them. Then I started noticing things to appreciate even when something else was going wrong.

Over time, I started calling what I was doing Ridiculous Gratitude.

And by the time I saw that bumper sticker, being grateful for something as ridiculous as pooping actually made perfect sense to me.

Because Life Stinks Sometimes

And not just in the bathroom… 🥁

Okay, we’re almost done with the millennial dad jokes.

But I mean it.

Sometimes life genuinely stinks. People get sick. Money gets tight. Relationships get difficult. Something breaks. Plans fall apart. Somebody dies. You get news you didn’t want.

Or maybe nothing catastrophic happens. Maybe today is just REALLY annoying.

I’m not interested in teaching or sharing a version of gratitude that requires you to pretend those things don’t hurt.

If something sucks, I think you should be allowed to say: This sucks.

If you’re angry, scared, grieving, disappointed, or confused, gratitude shouldn’t require you to lie about that either.

This is part of why gratitude can feel fake when life gets hard.

Sometimes we’re so quick to “look on the bright side,” find the lesson, or remind ourselves what we should be grateful for that we skip over part of the truth.

We can try to make the hard thing sound better than it actually feels. And if you’re at that point about something, great!

But if you’re not there yet about a thing, I don’t think we should practice “pretend gratitude.”

Gratitude, real gratitude anyway, can handle the complete truth.

Because whatever is going wrong is rarely the only thing that’s true.

Something can be broken while something else is still working. You can be hurting while somebody is helping. You can be unsure about what happens next while something right in front of you is still worth appreciating.

Multiple things can be true. Simultaneously.

That’s an important truth powering what I now call Ridiculous Gratitude. No need to pretend we feel like hard things are good, before we notice what actually is good.

We can be grateful IN something without being grateful FOR it.

We can tell the truth about what isn’t working while getting better at noticing what still is. And getting better at noticing one thing doesn’t mean we ignore the other.

Gratitude shouldn’t be something you manufacture when life begins to fall apart.

Reading this book, you’ll begin practicing noticing what’s working in ordinary moments you might normally overlook. And you’ll do it so often that eventually you start noticing what’s working when life isn’t ordinary at all.

That requires reps.

Preferably ridiculously small ones.

So Why the Bathroom?

Because you’re probably going to use one today.

And tomorrow. And the day after that.

You might forget to journal. You might forget a morning routine. You might forget some gratitude exercise you read about in a book.

But your body has a pretty reliable way of reminding you when it’s time to use the bathroom. And after I saw that bumper sticker, I thought:

What if, instead of relying on sporadic reminders for gratitude, I attached the practice to something life was already going to remind us to do?

Not twenty minutes. Not even five minutes. As little as ten seconds.

Go to the bathroom. Smile. Say thank you for one real thing you honestly appreciate. Stay with that gratitude for 10 or more seconds. That’s basically it.

Ridiculous? Absolutely.

But ridiculous is part of what makes it easy to remember. And the bathroom isn’t really the point at all. It’s just an ordinary trigger.

A moment your life already gives you that can remind you to practice without adding something else to remember. Bathroom breaks just happen to be a ridiculously reliable ordinary trigger.

Every time that trigger happens, you get another rep at seeing more of what’s true.

What I Want You to Do with This Book

You don’t have to agree with everything I say.

I don’t even need you to believe this practice is going to work before you try it. Actually, I’d rather you test it. That’s why I did without knowing it.

I practiced gratitude in ordinary situations for years. Then life gave me much less ordinary situations to test if I was truly grateful. I’ll tell you about some of those situations in Chapter 5.

But don’t skip ahead looking for the dramatic part. One of the biggest things I learned is that it’s better to practice before you need the practice.

That means we’re starting small. Ridiculously small. Ten seconds small.

And since you’re probably going to have to use the bathroom soon anyway…

We might as well start there.