I learned to walk when I was 2, and almost instinctively, I made it my life’s motto to “always watch my step.” Now that I am 30, and having lived most of my days walking and randomly stepping on dog poop, I can now say with adultlike conviction that sh*t happens. 

It happens without warning on any given day (but mostly Mondays, Fridays the 13th, and during Mercury retrograde), and in the most inconvenient places, too (a public toilet, emergency rooms, inside people’s heads). Sometimes it shows up alone (think about a confessional). Other times it gets some bad company (now look at Congress).

One Thursday, however, the proverbial sh*t turned out to be a piece of iron wire lying on a sidewalk along Timog Avenue in Quezon City. I didn’t notice the wire until I felt a sharp sting in my foot. It was the sort of sting that climbs up the shin and says, look here, stupid, there’s blood! So, I stopped, looked under my left shoe, and saw that the sharp thing had pierced through the sole to an inch deep and hit the ball of my foot. I gasped, and in between a staccato of curses, I pulled the wire out, sending quick shivers up my spine. Of all the lucky Thursdays I had, that one Thursday was when I wished I had stepped on poop instead.

After a year of living in Quezon City, on a street called Zamboanga where dogs outnumber kids (and kids like playing outdoors barefoot), I thought I had already mastered the footwork necessary to avoid landmines of animal turd. But then, stepping on a wire was another painful lesson to learn, which comes with knowing medical facts about tetanus and finding ways not to die from it. 

Suddenly I thought about Jesus. In His 30s, Jesus was crucified with long iron nails hammered through His hands and feet, at a time when vaccines were unheard of. For three hours, Jesus suffered on the cross before His anguished mother and a cackling crowd of Roman soldiers. I was reminded that stabbing my foot with a flimsy iron wire was a mere tickle.

The pious reader may find my writing “sh*t” and “Jesus” in the same sentence irreverent, but I’d like to say it for emphasis that Jesus went through a ton of sh*t trials in His life. And no mortal can ever take that tormenting path—from Bethlehem to Golgotha—the same way He so selflessly did. Jesus made miracles: He turned water into wine. He fed over 5,000 people from five loaves of bread and two fish. He healed the leper, let the mute speak, the paralytic walk, the blind see. He didn’t end war and poverty, but His ultimate act was the divine resurrection: He rose from the dead. 

I don’t mean to preach. Even my language would show I’m not religious. I just think that Jesus is the perfect example to make my point that life on Earth is half crap, half miracle even for the holiest person who ever lived. It’s only a matter of which half comes first. (It’s 2024, and I guess everyone is so dumbed down by the chicken-and-egg scenario, so let me put it in a Venn diagram.)

Picture the word “sh*t” in one circle and the word “miracle” in the other. (Or, if you are the kind of person who doesn’t like to draw diagrams with cuss words, you can use the words of the year, Oxford Dictionary’s brain rot and Cambridge’s manifest, just to make sure we are following the same logic.) And right there where the two circles meet, that shadow zone of encounter, that is where we insert Merriam-Webster’s polarization. A rational person would think that sh*t and miracle are two polar opposites, but sometimes life teaches us that a sh*tty thing can turn out great if only we give it more time and thought.

I don’t know who said it first, but the phrase “sh*t happens” was first seen in print in 1978, according to Merriam-Webster. Flash back to 1978, the year when many unfortunate events happened: Two popes died; the Afghan war broke out; the Philippines was under martial law; Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was still president. Wherever you looked in the world, there was dying and killing and chaos. But 1978 was also the year when the first “test-tube baby” was born—the one where Netflix got the inspiration for the film Joy—and the first operational GPS satellite was launched in space. There could have been better tradeoffs for all the great troubles we had in the past—in fact, the Philippines could have had a better president today who is not a Marcos—but having IVF and GPS are good enough compromises for the meantime. Plus, we have Netflix and Wi-Fi. 

The planet is now filled with these marvelous things, and honestly, half of the time, that terrifies me. What if one day robots get to be more employable than humans? What if humans become more and more demoralized and just quit? What if I don’t land that writing job I signed up for just because the company thought ChatGPT could do it better and way more efficiently than I could, and now I’m stuck doomscrolling on social media for funny memes and motivational talk as my therapy? There must be a sh*t side in all of these genius innovations, I think; I just keep hoping that it’s not all bad. 

Hope, I realized at 30, is sort of miracle’s little sister, and despair’s benevolent twin. And as twins, they typically sabotage each other. Hope is there whenever I seek a new job, a new hobby, or even just a new pen. But despair pops up as soon as I open my inbox and see the list of rejection emails I received over the year, which depressingly start and end with “thank you.” (I got the “thank you” twice for applying for the same job just two months apart.) Despair is this unkind voice that tells me sh*t happens. Hope is the friendly one that whispers, watch your step, walk past it, keep going. Sh*t will happen again, warns despair. And his lovely twin hope replies: Some things in life need sh*t to grow, so just go ahead and take your shot, anyway. 

Now the Christmas season is here. We’re happy to celebrate Jesus’ birth. A new year is coming, and everyone seems excited and hopeful. We will welcome 2025 with a basketful of fruits and a spectacle of fireworks. Then, after all the round fruits run out and some fingers get blown off by firecrackers, life becomes crappy again. Old problems are replaced by new ones, and new problems get to multiply like amoebas. And amoebas, as we already know, make people sh*t. I can go on and say sh*t historically caused the plague, but you get the big picture. We have learned to take our sh*t seriously, to wash our hands—even to write “sh-t” properly in a digital magazine that, the editor tells me, is fit to be read by both intelligent children and adults—and to watch our step in the hope of living longer, happier, wiser.

Read more: Finding our way to happiness amid life’s difficulties