THE ESCAPE - WHY WE OFTEN NEVER TRULY ARRIVE WITHIN OURSELVES
On Freedom, Restlessness and the Need to Keep Moving
This is Volume 5 of the "Our Time" series.
A young man runs through a narrow passage between high walls. Behind him lie fences, watchtowers and locked doors.
Ahead of him, the East Berlin Television Tower rises above the city.
It looks like freedom.
But not every escape ends where the walls stop.
Some people leave a place. Others leave a relationship or a profession. Some cross countries and continents, start again somewhere else and keep moving without ever being quite sure what they are searching for.
THE ESCAPE is about this movement between leaving and arriving – and the question of why outward freedom does not always bring inner peace.
Drawing on personal experiences from imprisonment in East Germany to professional success and collapse, relationships and loss, and years spent living in a motorhome in Australia and New Zealand, the book follows a life marked by repeated departures and new beginnings.
Changing the outside can change almost everything.
Except, sometimes, what we take with us.
And perhaps that is where the more difficult journey begins.
THE ESCAPE is for people who are going through change, beginning again or wondering why even a life with considerable freedom can still leave a strange sense of not having arrived.
It explores freedom and escape, relationships and loss, work and success, loneliness and closeness – and the inner restlessness that can survive every change of scenery.
This is not a guide to finding your purpose, a programme for self-discovery or another set of rules for finally getting life right.
There have probably been enough rules already.
Instead, THE ESCAPE asks a quieter question: What are we really searching for when we keep changing the world around us?
Sometimes leaving is necessary. Sometimes a new place really does open a new chapter. But outward change can also hide inner restlessness remarkably well – at least for a while.
Perhaps arriving has less to do with finally finding the right place than with no longer needing to escape from the one place we always take with us.
Ourselves.
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