Today, a four-year-old told me he was potty-trained. This, reader, was a lie. I didn’t know it til he was fighting for his life on the toilet (eat some fiber, kid), and creating a radioactive atmosphere from the depths of his colon. I mean, this kid must be eating nothing but broccoli and steak dinners. It was a fearsome thing to behold. I told him, probably heartlessly, to wrap it up because the sucker was taking a billion years, and he said, “Okay, I already went poopy.” Uh, okay, duh. Turns out he couldn’t wipe. I went in to help him out and he’d somehow defied gravity and was just slathered in poop. I handed him a wad of toilet paper, and he took one square of it, just one, poked his fingers through instantly and got poop on his hands. So I wiped the “potty-trained” son of a gun myself. I hate poop. It’s funny in the proper context, but nothing makes me gag more. I gagged and he laughed. Laughed. The little jerk. But, that is not my point today. No, I choose to focus on the good today.

Some things in life are just so objectively good. Some can go either way. Something one of my friends and I have gotten in the habit of doing is seeing something mediocrely negative or living a negative moment and saying, “no, no, it’s fine, I like it.” It usually makes us laugh, which in turn magically makes a bad moment better. You took a wrong turn when we’re already late? You know what, I like it. You accidentally elbowed me in the face when you were reaching into your backpack? That’s okay, I like it. It can be like fake laughing until you actually start laughing. It just works, and complaining can be such a miry pit of annoying dreariness. It’s sooooo boring and lame to be around.

Another thing I love to do is take moments that can go either direction, and find something good, even if it’s the tiniest detail, or turn the situation for good in the way that I view it. One of my favorite feelings in the world is, on a cold and kind of foggy day on a hike or on the way to class, walking into a small patch of sunlight that pierces your face. I could be a total butt about it and complain that the sun is blinding me (this is a common experience because my eyes are very blue and I am a very weak person), but instead, just standing in those patches and letting the sun fill your closed eye sockets, and basking in that small place of warmth and gold and just allowing myself to the find the beauty. I adore those moments. Sometimes the sun is so bright and sweet that it almost makes your other senses go dim. All you can do is feel the sun on your face, because it’s so bright you almost can’t hear properly. Goodness, what a magic feeling.

Sometimes I just have to remind myself to pause and look at the squirrels and birds and think about what they might be thinking about, or the little tasks they do in a day. I grow endless plants (I love my plants so much) because it makes me feel closer to life. Watching the little teeny sprouts come up brings me a gentle euphoria every time. There’s life! It’s growing right in front of my eyes. It’s beautiful. I love gentle beauty. I love running as hard as I can with pure abandon while someone runs after me. It’s a very specific thrill that I haven’t felt since I was a kid but I can recall as if I did it this morning. I love reading a whole book in a day. I love laughing so hard you can’t breathe, and stacking on the same joke, bouncing back and forth with someone until you’re unintelligibly cawing at each other trying to say God only knows what, but you’re about to pee your pants. I love that when you walk next to toddlers they automatically reach their hands up for assistance.

My childhood best friend has a fawn that she raised right around her house out by the woods. I love that fawn. Her name is Leila. I didn’t know deer could get zoomies like dogs, but they can. I didn’t realize that deer lips feel like rubber and that they love apples, or that they wrap their long necks around you in some kind of embrace to show that they feel kinship, but oh, what a joy to know that they do.

I guess I can go to emotional Doodyville far too often. But it’s a good and right thing to see something beautiful and good and acknowledge it for being so. I think I would go as far as to say it’s rude. My college best friend’s mom always told her to “never withhold a blessing”, and you know what? That’s true. If someone looks beautiful, tell them. If you love someone in the details of who they are or what they do, or even the sheer decibel volume of their laughter, tell them. Life is too short, and too full of pain, but also too full of good and sweet things to do everyone a disservice and not say what is good, and true, and beautiful.

So, even if a four-year-old says he’s potty trained but somehow you end up wiping an unbelievable amount of poop of his whole entire butt, things are still okay. Life is still good. L’chayim, everybody.