Comments on: Reviving the Orkney tradition of hitchhiking

By: solasan

solasan — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:30:20 +0000

Hi all,
here at Findhorn, informal hitchhiking is nothing new, people often stand on the corner of the Findhorn Foundation ‘Park’ entrance and hitch a lift, as there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing of cars to Forres. I almost always pick someone up – I enjoy meeting people that way, and also it helps in a small way to assuage my guilt that I’ve driven there. But also because it’s fun to meet people and chat about ‘Findhorn connections’. Many years ago a friend and I, as students, spent a holiday hitching around the South of France, and another time I hitched with a girlfriend from Newcastle to London and back. I’d have been horrified if my daughter had done that 20 years later, though! How sad that we live in this ‘fear’ culture where we automatically mistrust the motives of anyone standing by the roadside hoping for a lift.

By: rachel

rachel — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 09:50:04 +0000

Kerrilee, that’s one of my most well-thumbed books! I bought some 10 years ago when I was living in DC when people in my neighbourhood were being violently mugged regularly. You felt like you couldn’t walk down the street at night without someone coming up behind you and grabbing you.

Thanks to it, when someone did try to mug me at gunpoint, I stayed calm enough to persuade him to just take my cash instead of my whole bag (I didn’t want the hassle of having to get my license and credit cards replaced) and paid attention to his features so I could give the police a full description later on. Turns out he had mugged a lot of people, and when I described him and which way he’d gone, they were able to put on a helicopter search and snag him less than an hour later. Off he went to jail and I even got my money back.

So yes, that book has helped me tremendously and everyone should read The Gift of Fear.

By: Darcy Prince

Darcy Prince — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:10:15 +0000

I am *loving* the hitchhiking series of posts. Keep ‘em coming!

By: Kerrilee

Kerrilee — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:18:09 +0000

Have you read Gavin De Becker’s “The Gift of Fear”? You can definitely wad that up in your fear-fighting pipe and smoke it – he writes a lot about the perception of risk and how to recognize (and respond to) true fear versus anxiety and worry.

Excellent stuff, worth getting your hands on.