Hijacking Existing Time: A Bathroom Encounter That Changed My Life

While traveling, I met a man from Africa in a public bathroom who changed my life.

He walked in talking out loud to himself, stepped up to the urinal, and started saying positive things. How beautiful life is. How grateful he is for anything he gets. Just genuine appreciation for being alive. When we were washing our hands afterward, I asked if he did that every time he used the bathroom.

“Of course,” he said. “What better time?”

//What a profoundly beautiful response That answer stuck with me because it’s such an elegant system. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Most people use the bathroom 6-8 times per day. Roughly 2,500 times per year. What if every time you unzipped, sat down, or washed your hands, you said something you were grateful for? The habit comes with a built-in cue you can’t ignore, repetition you don’t have to manufacture, and it costs nothing. Your brain forms habits through repetition anchored to triggers. The bathroom is a perfect trigger because you can’t snooze it. You’re not adding time to your day. You’re hijacking time that was already happening.

//What if every one of those moments was intentional? The man wasn’t just thinking these things either. He was saying them out loud. That matters. Internal thoughts are easy to ignore. They blur together with everything else bouncing around in your head. Speaking forces a level of attention and commitment that thinking doesn’t. It’s harder to be half-present when your own voice is in the room. Gratitude also compounds. Repeated often enough, it stops being a temporary emotional state and starts becoming a default lens through which you experience the world.

But the deeper thing wasn’t the habit itself. It was the framing. “What better time?” isn’t really a productivity tip. It’s a philosophy. Most people treat gratitude as something reserved for special moments. Holidays, milestones, and times when life is obviously going well. He had flipped that around completely. Ordinary moments were the special moments. He wasn’t waiting for a reason to be grateful. He had decided that existing was reason enough.

He changed the way I think about my day in less than two minutes. I’m writing about it days later. You’re reading it now. All because one guy found 2,500 moments per year that everyone else ignores and gave them a purpose. If you repeat a worldview that many times, eventually it stops being something you practice and starts becoming who you are.