The bathroom is my temple.

“Wait wait… go in with your left foot”, is something most of us raised in this part of the world may have heard from our admonishing parents or grandparents as we made our way into bathrooms, washrooms, WCs, toilets, 7ammams, etc…

Well left foot or right foot, or both feet at the same time (if you, say, hop into the bathroom), I am finding it more and more relaxing to be inside the bathroom.

What do I mean by relaxing? Well I do not mean that using the bathroom relaxes me physically as I rid my body of wastes. I am referring to a form of relaxation that is intangible. The relaxation I am talking about more or less resembles a pause button from the whirl-wind of daily life. It is a time when you are completely by yourself (unless you’re perverted) and have sufficient time to contemplate serious issues, put at ease some anxieties, make tough decisions, and see complicated things clearly as if de-layered.

It struck me one day when I was using the bathroom and started to drift into the tiled walls of blue and white. Bathrooms are usually silent: they don’t have tvs, radios, turned on monitors with pictures to see or read, and they usually smell nice. Perfect conditions that even the most prestigious libraries in the world can envy. No chattering teens, no noises of people walking up and down the isles of book shelves. No food or drinks. The bathroom is the Utopian library for one single human. And after making this comparison, think about it and try to think about the feeling you get when you entered public libraries, or school / university libraries. Something about the library soothes you as if spiritually. Now back to the bathroom: if you can make the leap that connects libraries with bathrooms, the bathroom becomes a spiritual place.

I recall one time when I was enjoying the serenity inside my bathroom
when something interrupted the silence; it was a beep coming from my cellphone. I had received a message. It happens, no big deal.

So I took the phone out of my pocket > “Read Message”. It was an SMS advertisement sent by a local restaurant. So I removed the screws from my cheeks to let my jaw drop and allowed myself to be taken aback by how my privacy was raped, my two minutes of peace were infiltrated, and that the fast-paced world was crawling into my bathroom from underneath the cracks. I got goosebumps. It felt as though something was sucking me back into the whirl-wind of busy life, something that was jealous of my peace, something that was afraid that I would begin to see things differently in there.

Eventually one must come out of the bathroom. Living in the bathroom is not a good idea: others will need to use it you know. But making use of the times we end up going into the bathroom to recharge ourselves, to relieve ourselves of stress, to rejuvenate our thoughts and feelings, is something I believe can have a positive effect on anyone. We live in fast-paced modern times that has been dubbed the “age of information” where merely waking up and driving to work exposes you to a wide array of so much information to be digest on a conscious and subconscious level. Taking a few extra minutes in the bathroom to unwind can be positively refreshing.

The next time you go into the bathroom, take your time – really – and see if you feel the same way.