Confessions of a Horseshoer

The Eight-Week Syndrome

226 The Eight-Week Syndrome I’ve been shoeing horses for a lot of years and I think I’m beginning to learn some lessons about life from my customers . Horse owners come in all kinds of shapes and all kinds of attitudes and philosophies, and you can never really guess what they’ll do. I’ve developed a respect for this. But, regardless of what they do or don’t do, I’ve learned from them that life moves on. Especially in an eight-week cycle. Let me explain. Typically, horses need to have their feet done every eight weeks. There are some bizarre exceptions to this, but generally the horseshoer shows up every eight weeks. My usual greeting to my customers has always been something like, “How’s it going?” or “How have you been?” These are not rhetorical questions.A lot of horse owners,who trust the care of their horse to the shoer, also trust the shoer with the details of their lives. Horseshoers frequently take on the role of lay therapist, sometimes just being a good listener, sometimes offering advice, sometimes strongly recommending certain actions. I’m becoming more of a listener because I’m slowly learning that advice isn’t really needed.Listening is. A common response to my question about how they were doing has often been something negative: a sickness, a job loss, a breakup in a relationship—the usual concerns that • The Eight-Week Syndrome • 227 people have. I always commiserated. Many of these troubles were quite disheartening and I took some of them home with me to worry about in my off time. But when I came back in eight weeks, after my opening greeting of “How’s your problem going?” almost without exception my customer would say something like, “Oh, everything’s OK now,” or “That never came about,” or “I’m really glad I got fired because now I’ve got this great new job and I’m making twice as much money.I can’t believe I was so worried.”What I consistently find is that no matter what the problem had been eight weeks ago, it often was no longer a problem.The issue had been resolved, been fixed, or the customer had just moved beyond it. Sometimes a new problem had replaced the old one, but the lesson was that the old one was usually gone. The regularity of this phenomenon makes me look more closely at my own life,and as a consequence,I find it more difficult to consider suicide,or the Foreign Legion as answers to my own problems—simply because I’m pretty certain they’ll be gone in eight weeks.There’s a good chance that something equally troublesome will have replaced them, but then I just have to wait another eight weeks and that one will be gone, too. And I find that I enjoy life a lot more knowing this. Sometimes, these days, I worry that my customers will notice that I’m not as fully engaged in their problems as I used to be. I hope this doesn’t cause any of them to switch to another therapist, but should I worry about that? If they fire me, I’m sure I’ll have another,even better customer,in eight weeks. This eight-week theory works pretty well on the smaller troubles we have in life, and sometimes on the bigger ones, 228 • Confessions of a Horseshoer • too,like for example,the loss of a job or the break up of some relationship. Occasionally these also can reach some kind of resolution in eight weeks. But sometimes it takes more than waiting eight weeks. I think about the deaths of my mother and father where eight weeks isn’t going to fix anything. I’m aware that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen them, and I miss them. When they were alive and living in another state, I often didn’t visit them for an entire year.The longer I was away,the more I wanted to see them,and eventually I would go for a visit, fill up on family enough to hold me for another year,and leave.When I ran low on family contact, I’d return home again. But that doesn’t work with death. I can return to the town of my youth, but that doesn...