The saying, “May all your troubles be little ones,” is thought to have originated as an Irish Quotation. Little problems, of course, have a way of turning into bigger problems. The old saying, “For want of a nail, a shoe was lost, and for want of a shoe the kingdom was lost” expresses the same idea (see Well-Known Expressions for examples). A related staying from the days of hand darning and sewing was a stitch in time saves nine.
The idea is that we do well to address minor problems before they become major. That’s why most of us see our dentist twice a year. It’s also why automobile manufactures encourage vehicle owners to follow a regular maintenance schedule: change oil every so many thousand of miles; have the car tuned on a regular schedule, etc. We do well to attend to minor problems before they become big ones, or “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Big problems, however, often come in small packages. Fleas aren’t very big, but they can definitely cause big problems. For most of human history, they were tolerated as a fact of life. An old saying, Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas, goes back to Seneca, a Roman philosopher. And he was doubtless not the first to be annoyed by the pesky pests. Probably of greatest interest here is the indication of human evolution: What was once considered a normal aspect of life, is no longer considered tolerable.
The desire to eliminate problems, of course, is what drives progress. Progress seems to arrive by a process of two steps forward, one step back. Progress is, in fact, deceptive because we never know when we will have to take a step back. We can be moving forward with what seems relative ease, when something happens, and we are forced to go back and retrace our steps. That applies whether the “steps” are physical or metaphorical.
A long time ago I was trying to find a friend’s house out in “the country.” I took what I thought was the correct fork in the road and drove about 10 miles, getting farther and farther from any signs of habitation. I eventually had to stop, turn around and go back to the fork, this time taking the other one. That is, perhaps, what led John Lennon to quote the saying, Life is what happens while you’re making other plans. Whenever we get set in our expectations, we can be surprised by events outside our control
Paul Simon referred to the concept as “slip-slidin’ away”:
This concept applies to all of life. In relationships, for example, Ann Landers reportedly said, “The only people who know what a relationship is like are the two people in it—and sometimes one of them doesn’t.” My sense is that “sometimes” is not the right word. My sense is that two people are never in the same relationship. Each person has a different view of the relationship. That isn’t, of course, either good or bad—it just is.
So when it comes to fleas, no two people will have the same sense of urgency in eliminating them. At this point, however, virtually everyone will agree that it is better to live without them than to live with them. The same is true, of course, for all sorts of small problems that we would all do well to fix before they become big ones.