Evanston RoundTable, March 19, 2025

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards,” said the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and we know what he means.

The present races by second by second at a speed so astonishing and unmanageable we make all sorts of errors and commit all kinds of transgressions. Looking back on those mistakes we realize (too late!) what we should have said or done. “Wish I hadn’t done that” might be an inscription on many tombstones.

But those errors (assuming they’re not fatal) also teach us a few things. So one might say, to paraphrase the melancholy Dane, “Life can only be understood backwards, but that’s how we learn to live forwards.”

Dish soap metaphor

Take the humble soap dispenser. For over 40 years it has sat at the right shoulder of our home’s kitchen sink, ready to squirt dishwashing soap onto a sponge as needed. What could be more mundane?

But there’s a lesson in it, which I only recently grasped: don’t overdo things.

The lesson comes from filling the soap dispenser after it empties. I have a small funnel I use to pour the dishwashing liquid into the soap tank. For all these decades I have made it a point — almost a game — to fill it to the very tippy top. After all, why do this irksome little task more often than necessary?

Problem is, you can’t see how much room is left in the tank, which is made of some opaque metal substance and resides in the deep, dark, dank and unreachable recesses under the sink best left to centipedes and other small creatures. The only way to figure how much room is left in the tank is remove the dispenser and peer into the hole underneath. But you can’t tell: it’s pitch black down there!

So invariably I’d overfill it. Soap would come bubbling up over the top like lava at ancient Vesuvius and I’d be left with another nettlesome task, to clean up the sudsy mess.

It finally dawned on me, recently, to simply stop trying to fill it all the way up. Fill it three-quarters or even halfway. Duh, what an epiphany! Less bother to do it more often than to mop it up.

Better some slack

So what’s the lesson? As young people we want to see it all, taste it all, try it all. We fill our dance card and do the Lindy Hop and the Watusi and the Paragon Shuffle until rosy-fingered dawn drops us to the floor.

When we’re 18 or even 28 we can get away with it. But as we get older we realize it’s better to leave some slack for the inevitable problems that pop up, some space in the soap dispenser to keep it from overflowing.

This thought process actually applies to all manner of things, including arguments and fights that don’t need to start and friendships and love affairs that don’t need to end. Don’t push them to the limit: leave some slack for repair and recovery.

You might say: What a trivial example from which to trigger such a large inference. And I wouldn’t disagree. But the fact is life offers up dozens of trivial lessons every day that could be usefully extrapolated more broadly, if we’re sensitive to and aware of those lessons — and willing to apply them.