There are days when everything flows. You move from task to task with quiet precision. The kettle boils just as the toast pops up, your coat pockets contain exactly what you need, and your body cooperates. On such mornings, you think – though you try not to say it aloud – Perhaps I’ve finally figured life out. These are days governed by planning, preparation, and the reliable rhythms of a well-established routine. But as every seasoned woman knows, such days are rare guests, not permanent residents.

And Then Something Goes Sideways

For Maeve, retired teacher and part-time potter, it happened one bright Thursday morning. She had a modest plan: take the early ferry across the channel to visit her younger sister, Olivia, on Bainbridge. She’d wrapped a handmade bowl in linen, a pale green glaze set just right the evening before. She had slept well, woken early, and even managed a quick walk through the garden before loading the car.

But 20 minutes into the drive, winding through the hills of the Kitsap Peninsula, the car began to stutter. Not a sudden failure – no melodramatic smoke or flames – but a shuddering drop in momentum. She pulled over, hazard lights blinking against the morning mist, and sat still.

This is the moment – the point at which the day begins to unmake itself. Some women cry. Others curse. Maeve did neither. She sat in the driver’s seat with her hands in her lap and listened to the tick of the cooling engine. Her sister would be waiting.

Looking at the Choice

In that narrow wedge of time, a subtle choice presented itself – not about what to do next, but how to be. The past rose up around her like fog. She thought of her father, a steady man with a mechanic’s patience and a teacher’s precision. He had taught high school shop for 40 years, and on weekends let her pass him tools as he worked under their old Ford.

At 12, she’d helped him rebuild a carburetor, the two of them kneeling side by side on cardboard in the garage. Pop the hood, girl, he would have said now, not unkindly, but with that familiar expectation that she could figure it out herself. And she could. She had for decades.

But at 68, with the ferry pulling away without her and the world feeling suddenly overwhelming, she let the thought drift in: I wish someone else were here to handle this. Just this once. It wasn’t helplessness, exactly. Simply a flicker of longing – for ease, for company, for a pair of hands reaching the way her father’s once had, sure and capable.

But neither memories of the past nor hopes for the future were of any use right now. Only the present – the one good thing that still was – held power.

Not a Day Planned This Way

Maeve took out her phone, called a local mechanic she knew from town, and arranged for a tow. It would be at least an hour. She sighed, stepped out of the car, and stretched her legs. Across the road stood a trailhead she’d driven past dozens of times but never walked. The sign read: “Steep Ravine Loop – 2 miles.” She had on sturdy shoes. The air smelled of cedar.

It was not the day she had planned, but it became the day she needed. The path climbed gently through moss-covered firs, and by the time Maeve returned to the road, cheeks flushed, she had regained something that had slipped from her earlier.

Later, over comfortingly terrible coffee in the mechanic’s shop, she recalled a family saying – plainspoken wisdom with the ring of an Irish proverb:

Better one good thing that is,

rather than two good things that were, or

three good things that might never come to pass.

Gaining Peace

She smiled. The day, chaotic though it was, had yielded a single, quiet offering: not a perfect plan fulfilled, but an unexpected peace.

Too often, we mourn what was scheduled, lament what might have been. But sometimes, life’s disruptions coax us back to presence. The one good thing that is – a forest path, a capable hand, the soft weight of a pottery bowl swaddled in linen – is enough.

Recognizing it can be the difference between losing the day and redeeming it.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

How do you handle a day that doesn’t turn out as planned? Do you cry, yell, curse – or do you redeem the day to the best of your abilities?