First things first.

 Eating Dessert First – A Meditation on Life’s Sweetness

“Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first,” said the American humorist Ernestine Ulmer. What sounds like a playful remark carries a quiet wisdom about the way we live.

Most of us are trained to postpone joy. We tell ourselves that pleasure must come after duty: first the work, then the reward; first the struggle, then the celebration. Childhood prepares us for adulthood, adulthood prepares us for the future, and the future often slips away while we are still preparing for it. In this endless habit of delay, the sweetness of life sometimes remains untouched.

To “eat dessert first” is not a call to abandon discipline. Rather, it reminds us that joy need not always wait patiently at the end of effort. Life is uncertain and beautifully unpredictable. A moment of delight—a conversation, a melody, the fragrance of a flower, the quiet peace of prayer—should not always be postponed until every obligation is completed.

The ancient Roman poet Horace expressed the same insight in the phrase Carpe Diem—“seize the day.” Do not postpone the sweetness of the present moment. Like a flower that blooms only for a brief morning, every moment has a freshness that may not return.

Nature itself lives this way. Birds sing at dawn without worrying about tomorrow. Flowers release their fragrance freely, even though the wind may carry it away. The river sparkles in sunlight without saving its brightness for another day. In their own way, they are all “eating dessert first.”

A child understands this instinctively. Place a sweet beside the meal and the child reaches for it with immediate delight. The child is not calculating rules or etiquette. The child simply responds to joy. Perhaps wisdom lies not in losing this instinct entirely, but in refining it with awareness.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore once wrote that the butterfly “counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” The butterfly does not delay its visit to the flower. It goes straight to the nectar.

So the saying is less about food and more about awareness. It reminds us to taste life while it is before us—to savor kindness, laughter, beauty, and devotion without always postponing them for a later time.

For in the end, the meal of life may pass quickly.

Those who wait too long for dessert may discover that the plate has already been cleared.

Better, then, to taste a little sweetness whenever it appears—

and to thank life for it while it lasts.