Uncounted Joys

There are certainly many features in life we remember just certain ones which we don’t which are as important or perhaps more than anything else. Since they are so fundamental and ingrained in us, we fail or refuse to appreciate the pleasure we derive from it and also the despair in its absence.

One such activity is the phenomenon of excretion or shitting or pooping or dispensing. Choose the word you like depending on the level of obscenity (if it is) you are allowed to tolerate by your conditioning. I choose shitting.

The joy of shitting is incommensurable to any other activity which brings immediate joy and also the desire to look forward to getting rid of more of it. It becomes a daily routine and hence people refuse to realise its fundamental importance in our lives so as to realise it only when the mechanism goes bad or perhaps they lose out to sorrow of age. If we may analyse which exact part of shitting brings joy or peace, we would have to go through the whole process in a thought experiment. The first part is initiation when you sit on the commode and prepare yourself to start the activity, what follows is the mind getting prepared for it and since the muscles from the concerned region become voluntary and also conditioned to your biological clock, you would start losing out digested material from the very body of yours. It is this very process which brings pleasure which many people might like to classify as peace or the fact that it was burden to you and you got rid of it which gave you peace (which I maybe interpret as pleasure) but that is not really so. We carry shit every time in our time except that we are not really prepared to lose it other than the normal biological time we would want it to. The muscles of the anus are conditioned to open when you want it which is pretty much the same time of the day. Hence it is the joy in the sense of adding positive to zero and not decreasing the negativeness already present of which a case might be the situation when you wear really tight shoes and you are dying to get it off all through the day while you can’t, when you are able to do it, removing the shoes allows you to relax your toes which is pleasure in sense of decreasing the negativeness but shitting isn’t one of them.

The style of shitting has influenced lot of people in their classification of it as a necessary or a pleasurable activity. While the western world has the notion of sitting while shitting, the notion of Indian toilet (if they really belong to India) is of shitting while crouching. Crouching helps to lose out the body waste more quickly that what you would do while sitting because the physiology permits a quicker path for the shit to emerge being accelerated by the influence of gravity which would not happen for the horizontal path shit would travel while sitting. Which seems to suggest that Indians (or the people who shit that way) think of it as a useless activity which also suggests that they are busy or poor enough so as to not waste time on such a time.