Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don’t change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.

Guthrie’s folksy metaphor treats life as something inherently in motion—unreliable, un-“hitched,” and therefore impossible to manage by rigid plans or fixed beliefs. The advice is pragmatic rather than philosophical: meet circumstances as they are (“ride it like you find it”) and keep revising your assumptions. The punchline—“like trying to milk a dead cow”—casts intellectual stubbornness as not merely wrong but futile: clinging to outdated “notions” yields nothing. In Guthrie’s broader ethos, shaped by hard travel, economic upheaval, and ordinary people’s improvisation, adaptability becomes a survival skill and a moral stance against complacency.