No. 25: The Old Things Aren’t Working

Finding Solutions When You’re Out of Solutions

“The old things aren’t working,” my partner said.

It was Day 7 of a calf plague that had invaded the farm — some mysterious summer bug that was taking down the young cows, one by one.

In a decade-plus of being a farmer, he’d never seen anything like it: vigorous, healthy calves munching and prancing their way through pasture one moment… and then hours later, keeled over onto their sides, panting their last breaths.

I’ve never seen my partner so agitated and disconsolate. He prided himself on being a meticulous caretaker of animals. Indeed, when he sells his goats and cows, they’re invariably used by other farmers to breed and grow herds (versus used for meat) because his animals are so high quality.

And yet, here he was, battling an invisible epidemic that had no symptoms, no warning, no cure.

He went through every medicine in his veterinary cabinet — everything he’d used to treat sick animals before, every protocol he’d developed for exactly these kinds of situations.

“The old things aren’t working.”

He said it to me, completely at a loss.

And I understood.

I think all of us understand.

Because the old things aren’t working.

I’m thinking of politics, where an 81 year-old presidential candidate is telling us everything is fine, nothing to see here… when we all saw it and there is something to see and the old thing isn’t working and needs to be replaced, only we don’t know with what, so we all try to unsee it and tell ourselves everything is fine.

I’m thinking of publishing, where we keep pumping out the same kinds of books for kids, when kids’ literacy and reading habits are changing irrevocably and the books need to change with them, only we don’t know how, because this is not cyclical, this is existential, and we don’t have data for the existential.

I’m thinking of tennis, where I have played with the same racket, a Head Prestige, for 15 years (!!!), a racket of which I only have one of, because they’ve discontinued the line, and a racket I truly believe is the only perfect one ever made, and yet, one I’m starting to realize can no longer keep up with new technology, only I don’t know what to replace it with, because my racket is like my magic wand and how do you replace your magic wand?

And most of all, I’m thinking of writing, where for the last 10 years I’ve had habits as a writer — a certain kind of voice, tone, predilection of character and theme — that little by little, I find myself evolving past into something new and more muscular that doesn’t feel like me anymore, but is undoubtedly more me, if I stop comparing it to the me of old.

There’s a change in the wind, it seems. In every part of life. (Just ask J. Lo, who also invested in the old, happy thing, and it doesn’t seem to be working either.) And whenever I think I’m overblowing this, I open my Wimbledon app to check on my beloved favorite tennis tournament, and this year, am greeted entirely by AI-written news updates. (Sample sentence: “This loss means she’s been defeated and is out of the tournament.” God help us.)

Back to the farm.

Day 11.

A beautiful sunset. But in the field, another calf who’d started the day strong, was limping away from the pack, struggling for breath.

Especially alarming, because my partner had gone to the vet earlier that week and come home with their tried-and-true plan to treat the calves. Only that wasn’t working either.

Even the doctor’s old ways aren’t doing it, he said.

Well, what do you do when the old things aren’t working? I asked.

On behalf of the cows… me… him… everyone.

He looked at me with that face — the one that said he’d had enough of feeling helpless. Same face he had during the whole Malinky rescue, where he improvised his way out of a mom-calf deathtrap.

Only one answer, he said. You go a little rogue.

In this case, it was contacting friends at bigger pasture farms, the ones with hundreds, if not thousands of cows, and decades of experience, and asking point blank: what do you do to save calves when plague hits? Not the protocol stuff. The stuff that actually works. In other words — the kinds of things that a veterinarian would certainly not approve of?

A storm of texts descended. Everyone, it seemed, had dealt with their first calf plague, once upon a time, and through experience and crowdsourcing advice, just like this, they’d made it through. And now my partner was benefiting from this underground network, passing down secrets and wisdom, a minute-by-minute playbook to saving his herd.

“Yeah… not gonna tell the vet about this,” he said, headed back out to the barns.

Three days later, there’s been no new deaths.

The calves all look strong.

A plague receding.

My partner’s stress and depression, too.

He’d taken it so personally that his animals were dying. He’d believed it was his fault. And therefore he had to have all the answers.

This is the story of my life, too. I learned to live in the safe space that is my head.

And in that cozy, warm bubble, nothing bad can happen to me. Even in times of stress and suffering, my head tells me the answer is always inside me. That circumstances are always within my control. That I’m a one-man show in all things. That I just have to work harder, with more commitment and intensity. That I have all the available information to make things better.

But it’s not true. When the old things aren’t working, that’s the point — you don’t have the answers. And the only way you’re going to get some is if you leave your fortress, open up the gates, and see if someone out there is further ahead of you. This takes humility I do not have, as well as some degree of guilt, because once I start asking for help, I start realizing that maybe life would have been better and happier and more fulfilling if I’d asked for more of it all along. Maybe that’s what I’d tell my younger self: you don’t have all the puzzle pieces. You really don’t. And part of the fun in life is going to look for them.

And it’s quite marvelous that all of this is happening now, that I’m writing this down in this diary sprint, because as I do, I realize that this exact theme — the old things aren’t working and it’s because we ourselves are the old thing that needs to be updated — is also the theme of my new book! As if my unconscious has been wrestling it in the subterranean long before it found its way to the page.

Funny, how the mind is always behind the times.

Ironic, because I’m actually ahead of schedule on the new novel. I’ve finished the full first 60%, took a week to edit and polish it, and now it’s full steam ahead to the back-half. In the meantime, we’ll use this first 60% to start laying in visual elements, since that’s an essential part of the book, which I’ll be taking about more in weeks to come.

But it’s not all steady predictability. I’m also dropping a surprise announcement on my social media soon. One that will certainly throw you for a loop. The good kind, hopefully.

More about that next week.

Now it’s your turn — what’s an old thing that isn’t working for you anymore? Are you also sensing a change in the air that’s rattling all your old ways of being?

Until next week…