A watched pot never boils.
A proverb attributed to Benjamin Franklin
Most proverbs have some ambiguity about them that allows for a way of interpreting them so that they are true, but this one is clearly and demonstrably false. Anyone who has ever put a pot of water on to boil knows that it will eventually boil no matter how assiduously it is watched. Watching, in fact, has no actual discernible effect on the length of time required to make a pot boil1. Nevertheless, the proverb has caught on and endured for over two-hundred years. I daresay most Americans are familiar with it.
“A watched pot eventually boils” is certainly more accurate and still hints at how time can seem to drag when one focuses on an anticipated future event. Yet it’s hard to imagine this more accurate, duller version of the proverb becoming, well, a proverb.
There is an exaggeration in Franklin’s proverb that makes it memorable and pithy. Despite its being literally false, it endures because it encapsulates something of our shared experience when focusing on an anticipated event rather than carrying on with what we could be doing right now. By projecting our attention onto a future event, we no longer notice the present, and it seems that what we await, especially with eagerness, will never arrive. Every child at Christmas knows well this feeling. It seems Christmas will never arrive, and then it does.
More than that, however, this proverb—and, indeed, most proverbs—tells us something about the breadth and depth of human understanding. Literal truth is often inadequate for describing our experience. In fact, it impoverishes our understanding to insist on it. Reality is structured in such a way that the more literally we describe it, the less like our experience of it the description becomes. We have no choice but to express ourselves with metaphors in poetry and prose. The truth in them is not literal, but it is nonetheless true, and our efforts to squeeze out of them some literal truth as a take-way makes them less true not more.
I do not mean to imply that the effort put into interpretation is wasted or that our understanding of a poem, novel, Bible passage, or popular song cannot be enriched by deeply considering its meaning and trying to express it in different words. However, we should regard all such efforts as partial rather than definitive. Nothing real can be wholly described with words, but also nothing real can be deeply understood without them. We must use words to communicate meaning, and we must accept that our meaning may be misconstrued.
The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
popular Internet adage erroneously attributed to George Bernard Shaw
Jesus’ contemporaries often struggled to understand him because they took him literally. Consider Nicodemus2 asking how a man could re-enter his mother’s womb and be born again. Or think of the woman at the well3 who asked Jesus to give her the living water he promised so she wouldn’t have to return to the well to draw water. To this day many Christians still try to interpret the Bible as literally true, and, like the religious leaders4 of Jesus’ day, miss the overarching themes of love, mercy, forgiveness, and grace.