RESET YOUR SAT NAV

Our lives constantly twist and turn, but what happens when you reach a dead end, or you just have this nagging feeling that you need to change direction? Clover Stroud reflects on navigating her own life journey. . .

Are you on the right path in life?

On a cold, bright morning in winter, I sat down at my computer with a strong cup of tea and did something I’d been putting off for a year. To anyone else, it might have looked like an innocuous, even boring task, but I relished the two hours I spent at my desk, trawling through my online diaries. What I found there was a map of the everyday events – dentist appointments for my children, meetings scheduled with my publisher, dates for Sunday lunch with family and friends – that make up the substance of my life. What I was looking for, however, was evidence of the larger ebb and flow. I wanted to work out, by looking back at specific events, what I had lost, and gained, in a year that had completely changed my life. I wanted to work out, too, how I could use that pattern of change to help me navigate onwards. I know, unquestionably, that I am not alone in having experienced massive, and often unwelcome, life shifts. But looking back, as I skim past the dates, not just of 2020 but of many years before that, I realise that the only real constant in my life has been change. Often, when I’ve been going through an especially tough time, I use this as a way of consoling myself, of telling myself that the hard times will pass with as much certainty as the good times can never go on forever. The difference between a good day or a bad day, a challenging year or a happier one, is in the way I react to the change, rather than the change itself. I am now 45, so it’s age and experience that’s taught me this. Change happens, so perhaps the key is recognising it and putting yourself back in the driving seat by readjusting your internal sat nav, if you like, and boldly taking a new path.

I was only 16 when my happy, stable childhood ended, dramatically and traumatically. My mother suffered a riding accident, which left her acutely brain damaged and all the certainties of my life fell away. Mum never recovered and my family reeled apart. Two years later, when I finished my A levels, our house was sold and Mum moved permanently into a nursing home. So late adolescence and the start of adult life was rocky and confusing. But it did at least embed deep into my psyche the fact that life could change, for better or worse, in an instant. And that accepting the change, and working out how to live with it and take control of it, would put me back in the driving seat of my life.

I think it was the loss of family life that propelled me into marriage and motherhood in my early 20s. At the time, most of my friends were moving to London, sharing first flats together and generally avoiding commitment. By the time I was 27, more change came, when I left my first husband and found myself a single mother to a baby and toddler. Now I can see how naïve I was; how hard the challenge of bringing up small children together was, when we were barely past adolescence ourselves. But divorce was still a shock, as I’d thought my marriage would last forever. At first I felt I’d taken the wrong road entirely and should turn back, but that period, more than any, showed me it was my attitude that defined my ability to cope, not the road itself.

I certainly hadn’t planned to be a single mother, and the route I’d taken into early motherhood was difficult, but in taking control of this change, after it had crashed through my life, I was also determined to make the best of it. I worked hard and we made do with very little. Looking back, what might have been a wrong route became one of the happiest and most fulfilled periods of my life. I’d readjusted my personal sat nav and suddenly the road ahead, though not one I’d chosen originally, looked exciting and inviting.

Mum’s accident and my divorce were big, life-changing moments, but everyday existence has, of course, thrown up many other surprising twists in the road: work projects that didn’t come to fruition and had to be abandoned; problems my kids faced at school, which meant moving them, just when I thought we were settled; a love affair that didn’t work out; tax bills that suddenly reared up out of nowhere and bit me. I learned that coping with changes is all about viewing them as part of the tapestry of life, then determinedly embracing the new path they throw up, rather than seeing them as signs that the route itself was all wrong.

Then came 2020. Suddenly, we’ve all been separated from one another, locked down and locked out from a world we’d imagined would always be there. But it wasn’t just the pandemic that changed me last year. In late 2019, my sister Nell died, very suddenly, from breast cancer. And while Covid has brought challenges, they are manageable compared to the cauterising, disorientating, whole-body agony of grief. Grief is a fierce monster to wrestle with. It turns the map of your life into a completely new one you have to navigate through, alone. No one can live through your grief for you. I could share a little of my pain with my children and husband, but ultimately, going through it, and trying to alchemise it into something different, was work only I could undertake.

I’d do anything to go backwards, to the life I had before, when my sister was alive, and hugging was no longer a potentially lethal activity. There are other, lighter, brighter moments I’d love to turn back to, as well. I’d love to return to the time I met Pete, my second husband, to experience the incredible feeling of coming home that finding him gave me. I’d also pay good money to be 22 and at a rave again, just for a night. But life, of course, doesn’t allow any of us to go backwards. We are forced to go in the direction of travel, which is only ever forwards as the years slide by. We can’t go back, just as we can’t fast forward through another dull Tuesday afternoon. But having driven through a great deal of life changes, I’ve learned that, once they happen, readjusting the sat nav of my life, taking me out of the stationary traffic jam or away from the wrong turn, is something I am in control of.

So while I cannot change time, the past year has helped me cope better with recalibrating and being attuned to those moments when I need to take positive action. Searching through that calendar was a way of making a mental note of the bits of everyday life that have worked for me, and which I want to do more of (time outdoors with the kids, flasks of tea with a packet of biscuits), as well as the bits I’d like to jettison (running).

More than ever, I am acutely aware of the fact that dark days and challenging weeks, months, and even years, as 2020 has been for so many of us, do not mean life has gone in the wrong direction. Nor do they mean that there is no hope. You might have felt as if you’ve spent the past year waiting, biding time in the great traffic jam of life, but if 2021 can give us anything, let’s make it a sense that we are not victims of destiny. We can, if we want, be the driver, even if the path we’re on isn’t one we might have chosen,

Dark times and difficult paths are the stuff of life, just as much as the high days and holidays are. If you’re lucky, they’ll come roughly in equal measure. And when you feel as if you’re travelling through more of the darkness than light, the trick is to keep going. The past year, and so many times before that, have shown me not to look down, or even to look back too often, but to just keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep on trucking. Carry on walking and you’ll get to your destination eventually.

‘ACCEPTING CHANGE PUT ME BACK IN CONTROL’