I am sitting in Ice Cream Square.

It is a bucolic little park in the heart of our neighborhood, at the edge of a jungle and in the shadow of Pedra da Gávea, a monolithic rock that rises almost 3,000 feet above our neighborhood. It has a small playground for children and a few pieces of rudimentary exercise equipment for those so inclined — the kind that always seems to have exactly one determined retiree working the pull-up bar no matter the hour.

My wife dubbed it Ice Cream Square because a couple of years back the HOA placed a WizMart — a self-serve mini-mart in a repurposed shipping container — adjacent to the park, where we’ve been known to grab an ice cream bar to sustain us while walking on particularly hot days.

Today, I am walking alone. Walking and exercise help me find balance when the world seems to be coming at me faster than produce in Fruit Ninja. And it has been that sort of week. Not only had it been one of those weeks at my company where challenges seemed to pop up faster than mushrooms after a rainstorm, but earlier today we had to say goodbye to our cat, Romeow. Despite the fact that he tried to murder me every morning by weaving in front of me on my way down the stairs to feed him, he was a great lap companion and a wonderful listener to my monologues on any subject. He had opinions about all of it, mostly conveyed through the volume of his meowing and the insistence with which he head-butted whatever body part was nearest, but opinions nonetheless.

Making the decision to euthanize your pet, no matter how right it is, is fraught with guilt, what-ifs, and the unanswerable question of what he would ask of you if he could speak. Returning home to an empty house, where you look for him in all those old familiar places, only compounds the sadness. You catch yourself listening for the specific thump of him jumping down from the windowsill, and there’s a full second before you remember why you’re not going to hear it.

Did I mention I really needed this walk?

Normally, when I walk, I listen to an audiobook. Partially because it relieves boredom. Partially because it makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something. But mostly because it blocks out the intrusive thoughts that the walk was designed to free me from. Today, though, I decided that the whole purpose of this walk was to help me slay the demons that sometimes lie in my thoughts. No narrator, no plot, just me and whatever my brain decided to serve up.

Today my walk was full of thoughts of my dad, as they often are when I’m walking my way through life’s challenges. On my walk today, I found myself reminiscing about the advice he would give us when we ran into problems he felt deserved more attention. He would ask, “Do you think these problems would go away if you just sprinkled a little fairy dust on them?” He’d usually say it with one eyebrow raised, in the tone of a man who had heard every excuse in the book and found all of them equally unconvincing.

I have no idea where he got that expression. Probably some Viennese nursery rhyme from his childhood, translated into English. Or perhaps it was something his father had said to him. But I knew what he meant. He was trying to teach us that problems don’t solve themselves. There are no magic solutions. You’re responsible for solving them, so get on it. If it’s broke, figure out how to fix it. If your first solution doesn’t work, figure out why and come up with a new plan. And if that doesn’t work, repeat.

Hoping something will change just because you want it to is delusional.

But over time, I gave his fairy dust expression a different interpretation. Instead of thinking of it as a magic solution to my problems, I began to think of it as my work product. What “fairy dust” can I bring to the problem that will actually solve it? Not a wish. A deliverable.

And that is what I tried to do on my walk: apply fairy dust to the challenges my fledgling little businesses are facing. How to resolve some management problems with people who were trying to do the right thing but were spending too much time in the weeds and not enough time looking at the horizon. Where to find the next big revenue hit, and how best to cope with the clients we have who keep challenging us to do better. How to console my wife, who — in addition to dealing with the death of her companion of the last thirteen years — was suffering from guilt over euthanizing her beloved pet.

Sitting here on the small patio directly adjacent to WizMart, with the warm winter sun on my face and the sounds of the Brazilian forest — bem-te-vis singing their eponymous song, tamarins chirping and whistling as they do their tightrope act on the power lines, plus a few mysterious ones I can’t identify — I’m satisfied with my application of fairy dust. I haven’t solved all the challenges, but I know I’ve taken some steps, mental as they may be, to push the ball down the field. For example, I know no amount of fairy dust will ever fill the void in my heart for my pal Romeow, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that we did our best for him, and that wherever he is, he’s at peace.

My reward for such good work is not ice cream. It’s winter here (gasp, it’s in the sixties), so I’m enjoying a bag of Cheetos Requeijão — a flavor of Cheetos sold only in Brazil, of which I am particularly fond — and a can of Guarana Zero.

Life is good. Idyllic location, fairy dust applied. Om mani padme hum. I’m convinced that if I listen hard enough, I’ll hear the rich, resonant hum of a Zen bowl.

Then I made the mistake of looking down at my fingers and seeing they’re caked in Cheeto dust sludge — the kind that, I know from experience, gets so embedded into your skin and nails that it takes a power washer to remove. Which, of course, makes me think of the Grand Cheeto himself.

Talk about a buzzkill.

But it spurred a thought: if fairy dust is what you apply when you need to solve a problem, what does Cheeto dust do when you apply it to one?

Cheeto dust has to be the anti-fairy dust. Apply it to a problem and, instead of getting a solution, you get more problems and bigger issues. It doesn’t require decades of hard-won judgment. It doesn’t require you to sit with a problem long enough to actually understand it. It just requires a couch, a bag, and an unshakeable belief in your own genius — and the confidence to declare victory on the way out the door, before anyone checks the math.

For example:

• Think tariffs are going to create fair trade? Apply a little Cheeto dust, and next thing you know, not only do you have unnecessary trade wars, but consumer prices are jacked up — and instead of friendly partners, you’ve got pissed-off neighbors.
• Want to make Washington, DC special for the country’s 250th anniversary? Apply a little Cheeto dust, and instead of turning the reflecting pool patriotic blue, you end up with an algae pond that costs millions to fix.
• Go to a Knicks game to see “your” team play for the title for the first time in generations. Apply a little Cheeto dust, and “your” team loses its one shot at the championship.
• Decide immigrants are ruining this country? Apply a little Cheeto dust, and suddenly you’ve hired thousands of people who couldn’t get hired at McDonald’s, who murder innocent people and turn cities and towns into terror zones for citizens.
• Have a brilliant solution to the Iran nuclear issue? Apply a little Cheeto dust, and the next thing you know we’re spending billions a day on a war we can never win, creating a worldwide inflationary spiral, weakening our national defense, and turning allies into frenemies.
• Worried about the deficit? Apply a little Cheeto dust, and watch a tax cut for the people who least need one somehow get rebranded as fiscal discipline.

I could go on but you get the point.

So here’s my Fairy Dust solution for Cheeto dust. Since fairy dust takes decades of hard-won experience to work, and Cheeto dust just needs a couch, a bag, and an unshakeable belief in your own genius, this isn’t a policy problem. It’s a hygiene problem. What we need isn’t policy. It’s a pressure washer, aimed squarely at Cheeto’s grip on Congress, until the orange finally rinses off — and we get our Guarana-and-quiet-winter-afternoon back.

I’ll drink to that. Guarana Zero, obviously. It’s still winter.