It Tastes Like Milk

A man sits down in a diner. “What's the special?” he asks the waiter.

“Tongue sandwich,” the waiter replies.

“That’s disgusting!” says the man. “I could never eat anything that came out of an animal’s mouth!”

“What’ll you have then?” asks the waiter.

The man shrugs and answers, “Just give me a couple eggs over easy.”

Like the man in the diner, all of us make judgments about the way things are that seem completely rational to us. We hold on to these ideas for long periods of our lives, believing they prevent us from making bad decisions or having uncomfortable experiences. In some cases we guard them like valuable treasures that must be protected at all cost. But very frequently, we are wrong. Our judgments are often based on something other than reality, whether upbringing, culture, fear, past experiences or some other seemingly compelling yet inaccurate standard.

So what should we do about it?

In my family, when we tell people we raise dairy goats, almost without exception they begin asking a series of questions that to them must seem completely reasonable, but to us have become an inside joke.

We grin at the first question:

“Dairy goats? What do you do with dairy goats?”

“We milk them.”

Then we have to giggle at the inevitable second question :

“What do you do with the milk?”

“We drink it.”

The third question is always the same:

“Really? What does it taste like?”

“It tastes like milk.”

But no matter how many times we go through this exercise with some newly curious visitor to the farm, we find most people cannot quite understand what we are telling them. They carry with them ideas that have lead them to form unfounded conclusions about milk. They believe milk from a goat must taste like something other than the milk they get from the store. It must be goatier or farmier or non-real-milkier than real milk. Why? I have no idea. But I can tell you that before we started raising dairy goats, we each went through this exact same process.

So, as is almost always the case, we have to sit them down, put a glass in front of them, take a bottle from the fridge, and pour them some milk - goat milk.

They raise it to their mouth then set it down without tasting it. “What does it taste like?”

“It tastes like milk!” we insist.

“OK.” They pick the glass up again and smell it. “Hmmm?”

Finally, after some persistent prodding, they causally shrug and they drink it.

“Hey!” they proclaim licking their lips, “It tastes like milk!”

In doing so they abandon the ignorance that just a few minutes ago had them convinced that milk from a goat didn’t, couldn’t and absolutely would not taste like milk.

Just Start

This August will be my twenty-first wedding anniversary. Of the many lessons I have learned in these twenty-one years, one of the most helpful has been that it is usually best to just get started.

Sometime in late 1993, I had a poignant conversation with my father, then about age 60. SueAnn and I had been married three or four years. I had just started my first job out of college. We lived in a small apartment, had one car, our first baby was on the way, and I made $10.24/hour. Seeking some kind of affirmation that I was moving in the right direction, I asked my dad if looking back he would have done anything different in his life.

His answer surprised me.

"You know, Tyler, I have spent my whole life waiting for circumstances to be just right so I could do the things I always dreamed of. Now I'm 60 years old and I still haven't done most of them. If there are things you really want to do in life, don't wait until everything is perfect. Just do them."

Being, like my dad, a person who wants everything perfect before starting down a particular path, the advice seemed simple enough, but was very difficult in practice.

Enter my wife.

SueAnn is a starter, maybe even an instigator. She always has been. She sees no error in starting a project even if conditions are not quite right, or the outcome is uncertain, or the method is not quite sound. For many years, this frustrated me to no end. I felt as if all I ever did was go around cleaning up after my wife. To be honest, I still feel that way sometimes.

But at some point (I'm not sure when) her "starting" taught me that no project could be completed, no goal reached, no dream realized without first starting. Just starting.

So although I have still not become everything I dream of, let me tell you some of the things I am.

I am a father.

I am a land owner.

I am a cowboy.

I am a farmer.

I am a mentor

And now I am a writer.

Move another item from the "Wish I Was" column to the "Am" column. And all I had to do was just start.