Many people considering the RV lifestyle are hindered by one huge obstacle: themselves. They get caught up in the “what-ifs” and the “what-abouts.” The reality is all you can do is make the best plan you can — thinking ahead appropriately — but then make the leap. If you can’t change something, why worry about it? Unnecessary worrying never fixed a problem or prevented a potential one.
“The time to worry is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard.” – Amelia Earhart
There is a quote attributed to Amelia Earhart that’s about flying, but it’s apropos to many things:
”The time to worry is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard. It retards reactions, makes one unfit. Hamlet would have been a bad aviator. He worried too much.”
If I were to come up with anything Jessi and I disagree about consistently, it’s worrying. She tends to worry a lot about what might happen. We sometimes have arguments over things because I will respond to her concerns with something like, “You can’t live your life with, “Yeah, but what if?” as your motto. It drives her crazy, and any married person knows that knowing what buttons to push on another person is one of the things you learn early on in a marriage. (The key to a happy marriage is to push those buttons sparingly, but that’s a post for another day.)
That’s not to say you shouldn’t be prepared. If you saw the amount of tools, recovery gear, spare parts, and emergency food rations I tend to store, you’d think I was a huge worrier. But being a closet prepper doesn’t mean you worry a lot. It means you thought through the what-ifs, planned accordingly, and then moved on.
Anyone considering the RV life needs to know that things won’t go as planned. Equipment in the RV, and even parts of the RV itself, are going to break. There’s a great definition of RVing that I like to quote: “RVing is fixing things in beautiful places.” A person I follow at Substack told me that in the boating world, they often use the line, “Boat maintenance in paradise.” The boating and RV world often have a lot in common.
So, whether you’re considering jumping into the RV life or the boating life, make your plans, gather your tools and supplies in case a “what-if” comes true, and then stop worrying about it. You’ll find that you’re much more capable of enjoying the lifestyle, which was the whole point of tackling the adventure in the first place!