What’s saving my life right now

With a little help from Rick Steves

It’s February 1, the first day of what to many is the cruelest month, regardless of what T. S. Eliot wrote.

This isn’t an easy month—or an easy season—for many of us. To beat back the gloom, today we’re sharing the things—big or small—that are saving us right now.

The idea comes from Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderful memoir Leaving Church. In it, Taylor tells the story of when she was invited to speak at a gathering, and her host assigned the topic: “Tell us what is saving your life right now.”

It’s a good question. Most of us know what’s killing us, and can articulate it, if asked. But few of us pay attention to what’s giving us life. The question invites you to do just that.

Taylor says it’s too good a question not to revisit from time to time, and I agree.

My short answer to today’s question? Some Rick Steves travel advice from the 1990s, yanked from context, is saving me.

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My story starts last fall, when Will and I bought our plane tickets for Scotland—and quickly realized that being gone in December would be a big deal. We’d be leaving our home and our kids and our work, in the middle of an already-busy season, and we needed to plan carefully to be gone.

I also knew that if I was racing around finishing my to-do list at the very last minute, I’d be miserable—and there was so much to get done that if I waited, it wouldn’t get done at all.

When I was a teenager my parents took my brother and me to Germany. We did it Rick Steves-style, “through the back door,” staying in small pensions, eating at under-the-radar neighborhood spots. As an avid reader, my favorite way to prepare for anything is by reading, and I devoured countless Rick Steves travel guides from my well-stocked local library.

By the time we left the U.S., I’d internalized his travel philosophy: Don’t be afraid to speak the language (badly). Be “fanatically positive and militantly optimistic.” Expect and plan for things to go wrong.

He urged his readers to put point #3 into action by giving themselves a fake departure deadline: when preparing to leave to country, prepare as if your departure day is 24 hours earlier than your actual departure. Do your packing, run your errands, make all your preparations as if you’re leaving a full day early—even if you’re scrambling before your fake deadline. This way you’ll be ready and rested when it’s time to go, and—worst-case scenario—prepared to deal with a true emergency.

I thought about Rick a lot before our trip.

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To stave off last-minute panic before our departure, I set myself a series of artificial, almost arbitrary deadlines. I wanted my Christmas shopping done three weeks before departure, the blog content for before and after our trip written two weeks before departure, the podcasts scheduled one week before departure. I had no idea how to pack for winter in Scotland, and wanted my bags packed 48 hours early. And of course, because of Rick Steves, I wanted everything ready 24 hours early.

These self-imposed deadlines were ambitious, and required me to put my head down and work hard (and yes, in this context, scrolling target.com and researching winter boots counts as “work”).

I missed every single one of them.

But thanks to my ambitious fake deadlines, it worked out: the blog and podcast were finished before we left, not two weeks early, but in enough time. I wrote a twenty-page document with instructions for everything happening while we were gone. I finished maybe 85% of the Christmas shopping, but that was fine. I’d never gotten so much done so early, and besides, what if we found good gifts in Scotland?

The day before we left the country, things were downright leisurely around here. We had things to do, sure, but we weren’t panicked; we weren’t scrambling.

It was a great start to a great trip.

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We’ve been home now—for 6 1/2 weeks, I just counted it up on the calendar—and Rick Steves continues to save me.

We came home from Scotland a little early: we quickly rescheduled our flights due to a loved one’s sudden illness, and walked straight into the all-consuming whirlwind of medical crisis.

With our trip, with this season, we had planned for something to go wrong. We weren’t expecting it to look like this. Because of Scotland, we’d planned ahead for our kids, our work, our Christmas—and now I was grateful every minute those things (well, two out of three) were taken care of, but for a very different reason.

To be clear, it was kind of awful—but it could have been so much worse, and I was unspeakably thankful it wasn’t.

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We’re still trudging through in a lower-key kind of survival mode around here. January has been one thing after another, what with snow and sickness and unexpected crises.

But Will and I have been talking, about how it’s been hard, but—unlike in some memorable previous years where I kind of lost it for a bit—I haven’t come unglued. It’s not been fun, but we’re getting through it, and in reasonably good spirits.

I’m sure part of this is due to low winter expectations (it’s not like this is the first time the flu has decimated local schools, or we’ve seen ice and cold here), but it’s also because I keep giving myself those fake deadlines—and even when I don’t quite hit them, or unexpected junk comes up, I don’t fly into a panic. I’ve been stretching myself on the good days, asking for lots of help on the not-so-good, and building in margin.

I’ve been expecting and planning for things to go wrong, not with a head of full of cynicism, but of grace—for myself, and for the people around me, for circumstances I don’t welcome but are going to come anyway.

It sounds like a downer, I’m sure. But it feels like peace, and it’s saving me.

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What’s saving your life right now? Share your own blog or Instagram post below in the comments section.

What’s saving my life right now

With a little help from Rick Steves

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125 comments

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Find your next read with:

100 Book recommendations for every mood

100 Book recommendations
for every mood