Turn Around When Possible

On sat navs, free will, and the quiet inner GPS we sometimes forget to listen to.

I was reminded earlier that, before we had sat navs on our phones that could tell us what the traffic was doing, the first bit of tech I was aware of that gave you an alternative to driving somewhere new without also trying to read a map or decipher handwritten directions was a standalone sat nav.

We had a TomTom.

For those old enough to remember them. (And that sentence alone makes me feel old. It really doesn’t seem that long ago! 😂)

I can’t imagine I was the only one who, when driving through an area I knew reasonably well, would decide that I knew a better way than the route TomTom was proposing.

So I’d ignore it.

Take a different turning.

And then TomTom would start telling me to turn around.

At the time you could get various celebrity voices to give you the directions, each telling you to turn around in their own particular style. Amusing the first few times. Quickly becoming rather irritating.

Although, if I’m honest, I could also find it quite entertaining to deliberately take a different route just to see how insistent TomTom would become.

I’d ignore the first suggestion, take another turning and carry on.

“Turn around when possible.”

Ignore that.

“Turn around when possible.”

Still ignore it.

Until eventually it was very clear that TomTom REALLY wanted me to turn around.

Of course, sat navs on our phones are rather more sophisticated now. They can take into account far more information, including what’s happening with the traffic, road closures and all sorts of things that little TomTom couldn’t possibly have known about.

But I’m rather glad we still have free will.

Sometimes we think we know the area better. Sometimes we see something we think the sat nav has missed. Sometimes we simply fancy going a different way.

And sometimes we seem to have muted the sat nav altogether.

Perhaps that’s the bit that interests me.

Because there is a difference between choosing to take a different route and having lost touch with the thing that was quietly guiding us in the first place.

There is, I think, a kind of reliable knowing available to us. An inner GPS, perhaps. Not something that necessarily gives us a detailed route from A to B, or tells us exactly what we’re supposed to do next.

More a quiet sense of this way.

Or not that way.

And perhaps the trick, if there is any trick at all, isn’t to always follow the directions.

It’s to know that the directions are there.

So we can take the scenic route. We can ignore them. We can change our minds. We can follow an idea just because we fancy seeing where it takes us.

We don’t have to make ourselves wrong for any of that.

But when we’ve wandered a little further than we intended, or we’re not quite sure where we are anymore, perhaps we don’t need to think harder, search for the perfect answer or wait for someone else to tell us which way to go.

Perhaps we can simply turn the volume back up.

And listen.

If something in this post resonates, and you’d like to explore it in conversation, reach out.

We’ll see what’s there.

---