OUR FEAR - ALONE ON THE ROAD
Moving on without holding on - letting go, inner calm and a personal new beginning.
Volume 1 of the series "Our Time"
An elephant is running away. Large. Heavy. Powerful. Behind a pane of glass sits a small mouse.
And yet it suddenly appears larger than it really is.
Not because it is dangerous.
But because fear distorts perception. Something small becomes large. A glance. A thought. A moment. And that is exactly where much of OUR FEAR begins.
Fear does not arise only from what is actually happening. It also grows from what our minds and bodies make of it.
One morning, I was sitting outside my motorhome near Auckland, reading. The sea was behind me, the car park quiet. Then a Māori man sat down on the loading platform of my motorhome. When our eyes met, he came over.
“You do not sit with your backside where other people eat,” he said.
“Alright, I did not know that,” I replied and stood up.
Suddenly he kicked me in the thigh.
The encounter lasted only moments. But moments like this reveal how quickly calm can disappear, how rapidly the body reacts and how long it can remember something after the danger itself has passed.
Sometimes the mouse really is behind the glass.
Sometimes it isn’t.
And knowing the difference is not always as easy as it sounds.
OUR FEAR is about what happens inside us when the world feels uncertain – and about the difference between actual danger and the fear that continues long after the moment itself has passed.
Drawing on real experiences from a life on the road, the book explores fear and perception, stress and inner vigilance, overthinking and the desire for control. Between car parks, beaches, roads and unexpected encounters, a quieter question emerges: How much of what frightens us is happening now – and how much is being created by memory, expectation and thought?
This is not a conventional self-help book. There is no programme, no promise of permanent calm and no instruction manual for a fear-free life by next Tuesday.
Fear is considerably less cooperative than that.
Instead, OUR FEAR looks at how fear changes perception, how the body responds to uncertainty and why attempts to control everything can sometimes create even more inner tension.
The aim is not to eliminate fear. It is to see it more clearly – to recognise when it is warning us about something real and when a mouse behind glass has somehow become an elephant.
Bernhard Christoph Lichtinger writes from lived experience – from setbacks, detours, new beginnings and encounters that never needed to be invented. His texts begin where real life leaves its mark.
If you have not yet read a volume from the book series “OUR TIME”, you can begin with one of the following books. Each volume stands on its own and explores a different aspect of our lives.
Volume 2: THE DOG CATCHERS OF BLENHEIM
Volume 4: THE WORLD IN THE MIND