That Dog Won't Hunt

Chapter 6

This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Creating and Maintaining Living Spaces That Make Your Life Better (In Spite Of Everything) by Hanne Blank Boyd.

Click here for the full table of contents.

---

Illustration by Elizabeth M. Tamny

Sometimes you find yourself standing somewhere on this side of the realization that It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself, but do not yet find yourself Handling Your Business. You’re not refusing to admit that there are things on your plate. Probably you’ve even spent some time and energy hurling yourself gamely at the To Do List, but you’ve been doing a whole lot more bouncing off of it than tackling.

This is not uncommon. It is also curable.

The vast likelihood, in my experience, is that there’s nothing really all that wrong with the situation, you are merely spending a little time in the territory I have learned to call That Dog Won’t Hunt.

Imagine a hunting dog. Let’s say it’s a bird dog. No, let’s go even further. Let’s say it’s a sweet goofy Labrador retriever, sleek as a seal, well fed and well loved, well treated and well trained, able to sit and stay and shake and roll over and chase a tennis ball for hours, a dog who will walk without a leash and never fail to come to your side when you call. Our dog is a good dog, a truly fine representative of its species. There’s only one problem: you take it out in the field, or out in a duck boat, give the signal to go retrieve, and this dog just sits there and wags its tail at you.

You’re trying to get the dog to go retrieve a duck. The dog is looking at you like it’s trying very hard to understand you. Somehow there is a disconnect. The dog is paying attention. The dog is listening. But there’s… well, there’s a dead duck over there, and the dog’s not doing a damn thing about it.

You do need to know that there’s a @dog.derp.of.the.day on Instagram.

When this happens it means you’ve got yourself an excellent house dog, and that’s a beautiful thing.

But it doesn’t help you with your duck problem.

“That dog won’t hunt” very simply means the thing you’re doing isn’t doing the thing you need to do. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean you somehow magically just no longer need to do it.