> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.gilespcroft.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # That time my car got nicked - URL: https://www.gilespcroft.com/that-time-my-car-got-nicked/ - Published: 2026-10-28T07:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-28T07:00:00.000Z - Description: A calamity of epic proportions… but how much of it was in my mind? 🤦🏻‍♂️ - Author: Giles P Croft - Tags: Consciousness, Thought realisation, Real stories, Presence, Neuroscience, IMPLICATIONS, Gratitude, Focus, Expectations, Attention, Anxiety, Acceptance I talk a lot about how [thought creates our reality](https://www.gilespcroft.com/your-reality-is-a-perception-of-the-mind/), on the fly, and what a difference it makes to really *see* this. So today, I’m going to tell you a story about how that actually showed up in my life, in both seemingly ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ ways – all in the space of a couple of hours. It’s good to look at this understanding from a lived-in perspective, rather than always just talking about ideas and concepts. In doing so, I hope it will enable you to recognise this same process playing out in your own life. ## Old car We used to have a car. Nothing fancy, a bit old, bought second hand, but did the job. *Mostly* got through the MOT each time, but showing signs of age – the electric windows sometimes had to think about it before doing anything, and we occasionally had to lock the driver’s door manually, because the remote key fob wasn’t 100% reliable. But it was fine. Quite a nice drive. One day, in the run up to taking my daughter on a big hiking adventure, I had to dash out—in said car—and buy some walking socks for her, as she’d grown out of her existing pair. So I jumped in our jalopy and bezzed over to the next town, 20 minutes away, to visit my [favourite local outdoor shop](https://crickhowelladventure.co.uk/?ref=gilespcroft.com). At the time, I was in the middle of running a whole load of workshops for Social Services, so I was super busy. I know that I had to tear myself away from my desk, and saw the trip to the shops as an obstacle I had to overcome – one more thing, getting in the way of work. I didn’t speed, but I was busy running all sorts of work scenarios in my head, using the brief car trip to actively think about my problems. (This always seems like a good idea at the time, doesn’t it? But I’ve come to see, it’s just the mind endlessly [churning on old stuff](https://www.gilespcroft.com/right-tool-for-the-job/), which I don’t think serves much, if any, purpose.) ## Avoiding fees The next town—a pretty little place that has previously been awarded the [Best UK High Street](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/nov/16/butcher-baker-and-revenue-maker-crickhowell-named-uks-best-high-street?ref=gilespcroft.com)—only really has two streets and I just wanted to get in there, get the socks and come out again… but *without* paying for parking in its only car park. So as I rocked up, I was delighted to see that the long lay-by on the edge of town had a free short-stay space in it. Perfect 😙👌🏻 I dumped the car, noting briefly that I was parked behind a black vehicle, jumped out and literally *ran* to the shop, pressing the lock button on the key fob as I sped off. Thinking about work, the entire way. My interaction in the shop was as brief as I’d hoped, and before I knew it, I was jogging back to the car, to get back to my desk asap and get on with work. Only one problem: the car was no longer there. 😱 ## Fruitless search I was shell shocked. There was the lay-by. There was the black car I’d parked behind. And there was a blank space where my car had been, just 10 minutes earlier. I couldn’t believe my eyes, so I walked the entire length of the lay-by, just in case I’d misremembered where I’d parked it – I had been pretty distracted at the time, after all. But no. It wasn’t there. I walked out *beyond* the lay-by, in case I’d actually parked it on the street itself or something, but still no. I stood there, scratching my head. Did I just *imagine* parking it in the lay-by? I couldn’t have been that distracted, surely? Did I park it somewhere else? I replayed *everything* I could remember, in my mind. Arriving. Pulling up behind the black car. Getting out. Running away from the car, pressing the button on the fob behind me, to lock it… Oh. 😳 It mustn’t have locked. This was the unreliable key fob again. I was in so much of a rush, that I’d not taken the time to check the car was actually secure, and now some opportunistic thief had run off with it. My day had just got a lot more complicated. ## Local response I wasn’t entirely sure what to do. I came here with a car, and now I didn’t have one. I’d never had a car stolen before! I guess I needed to report it, for insurance purposes, but I didn’t think Crickhowell would be big enough to have a police station, so I popped in to the post office just across the way, to ask where the nearest one was. After queueing for a bit, I reached the lady behind the counter, and recounted what had happened, asking if there was a police station nearby. The colour drained from her face. > *“Your car’s been stolen? What, actually here?! In Crickhowell itself?!!”* This was obviously the biggest bit of crime that had occurred in the town's 800+ year history, and she was already contemplating putting her house on the market and moving elsewhere. > *“Gosh. Oh dear. Oh my word. Umm, I’ll call Bill* \[not his real name\] *– he’s our local bobby. He’ll come and talk to you. Oh dear. A stolen car. In Crickhowell!”* Bill, a lovely chap, was just round the corner, talking to someone about the previous night’s antisocial behaviour, and duly came and took all the details from me. He seemed a little sceptical at first, but when I took him to the lay-by and explained everything, we had a good look around on the ground and found some shards of broken fibreglass car exterior—the exact same silver colour as our car—on the ground. Oh, maybe I *hadn’t* left the door unlocked, after all – it looked like they’d broken in. Blimey! 😳 As Policeman Bill \[not his real name\] busied himself bagging the evidence and starting his official processes, he said to go sit in his police car and he’d take me to the station, to fill out all the necessary paperwork. So from the inside of a first-response vehicle, I phoned my wife, to tell her the bad news—she too was shocked—and asked her if she could come and get me, in our van, letting her know that I’d be at the police station (although I didn’t know where that was). > *“I’ll be there in 20\. I’ll call you when I arrive.”* ## Unexpected news Bill had quite a bit to sort out, with this literal crime-of-the-century, so I hadn’t actually made it inside the station yet, when my wife called me back. > *“I’m here. I‘m in that lay-by that’s just before town. Ummm, huni? I’m parked right behind our car. It’s here, now. There’s a black car in front of it, just like you said. I thought you said it had been stolen?”* WTF??!! 😵 Could this day get any crazier?! You’re telling me the thieves had broken in, taken it for a joyride and then *returned* it… to the *exact same spot?!?!* 😵‍💫 🤯 🫠 With a dry chuckle, Bill turned the police car round and headed back out of town to the lay-by, where we discovered there was *still* no car, and no wife and no van – just a black vehicle, and a space behind it, shards of broken glass, glittering in the sunlight. But Bill didn’t stop, he just carried on driving, grinning to himself, and then, with horror, the reality of the situation *finally* dawned on me. The colour drained from my face: > *“Wait… ummm, are there *TWO* lay-bys outside Crickhowell?!”* ## Tricksy thought As we rounded the very slightest of bends in the road—to which I had walked within feet of, when searching for the ‘missing’ vehicle—the other lay-by emerged into our sight-line and *there* was my wife, *there* was the van… and *there* was the car. **Exactly where I’d left it.** 😬 Oh my god. Bill chuckled to himself again, brushing off my now profuse apologies at such *shameless* time-wasting. (Did I say what a nice man he was?) > *“I suspect you’re in enough trouble as it is, without me adding to your woes. Good luck!”* Then he was gone. And Crickhowell was safe from marauding car thieves once again. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/f3/9bf3d316-7d32-494b-814f-a7d94d6358c3/content/images/2026/10/IMG_0827.jpeg) And it’s probably about time to remind you that: 🔑 ****Key Message**: We live in the feeling of a Thought-created perceptual reality. It’s real. It all happened. Exactly as recalled. But it’s [not true](https://www.gilespcroft.com/the-dragon-thats-real-and-not-true/). It’s never true. (It *can’t* be true, otherwise we’d all feel and think *exactly* the same about *everything*, all the time!) What we experience is just a mind’s best guess at what it *thinks* must be true, to be receiving the data that’s streaming in through our senses, there in that moment, as filtered through our biases, our conditioning and our past experiences. *Everything* that the Giles Ego Construct 📦 was experiencing on that day pointed to the car having been stolen, even though it didn’t *completely* add up – - Was it the faulty key fob or a smashed window, and if the latter, why were there bits of silver fascia on the ground? - How on earth had someone stolen the car so quickly? Were they camped in the out-of-town lay-by, just waiting for people to leave their vehicles unlocked? - What on earth would have possessed them to return the vehicle to the exact same spot they’d stolen it from?! (This was genuinely where my mind went, when my wife called!) But Thought Systems 📦 don’t care about all that kind of nonsense. Once they have ‘made up their minds’ (literally), they will then go looking for ‘evidence’ (however flimsy) to [prove themselves right](https://www.gilespcroft.com/meetings-from-hell/). Nothing stands in the way of an [expectations-fuelled ego](https://www.gilespcroft.com/expectations-and-reality/) on a mission. ## Consciousness alights The ‘problem’ here, wasn't so much Thought (although that's what experience is made of), as the flashlight of Consciousness. Because consciousness will only ever bring to life whatever our attention alights upon. If our attention isn’t *on* something, it’s not so much that we ‘miss it’, it’s that it literally [does not exist](https://www.gilespcroft.com/consciousness-is-bonkers/) for us. The crucial missing piece of the jigsaw that would have saved me, and Bill \[not his real name\] and my wife (and the poor woman at the post office) all that bother, was the *second* lay-by that I’d run past. But my attention was so utterly, so *comprehensively* focused on my work problems as I sped down the street to town, that it simply didn’t exist for me. There was no way the mind could have factored in something that didn’t exist for it… and so it reached the natural conclusion, for a Thought System 📦 presented with black car + empty lay-by space + dodgy lock mechanism: > **Best guess = Stolen vehicle** 🤷🏻‍♂️ ## Added Bonus My wife and I drove home in convoy, me chuckling to myself the entire way, super-relieved that we didn’t have to go through the hassle of an insurance claim for a car that had never been stolen in the first place. As we parked up and got out of our respective vehicles to go inside, my wife stood before me, grasped me by the shoulders and looked intently into my eyes, as if searching for an answer. > *“What?”* I asked. She shook her head in disbelief, > *“You're really not bothered in the slightest, are you?”* 😂 🤣 😂 🤣 It's true, I wasn't – I was just so blown away by how spectacularly fooled by thought-that-was-real-and-not-true, that I was still marvelling at all the wonders of the Universe, as I had been, all the way home. > *“Now. Do I win a prize if I can guess what you were thinking, on the drive back?”* I enquired. She nodded. > *“You were feeling mortified at the idea of this situation and super-grateful that it hadn't been you, weren't you?!”* 😮 > *“Oh my god, exactly that, yes!!!”* That's 15+ years of marriage for you, folks 😉😆 And a cast iron example of what a difference it makes to really *see* this. ## What's in it for you? I sometimes think I've been put on this earth to make a whole bunch of stupid mistakes so that **you* don't have to! But I hope you can see that this has got nothing to do really with cars-that-were-never-stolen, and everything to do with: > **Thinking less, and living more.** Because this exact same process is going on, when you're: - Thinking about, and [preparing for](https://www.gilespcroft.com/people-prep/) the next difficult conversation coming up - Arriving at conclusions [about why](https://www.gilespcroft.com/laying-bricks/) you feel the way you do - Figuring out [why someone behaved](https://www.gilespcroft.com/three-things-you-dont-know/) the way they did - Worrying about [money](https://www.gilespcroft.com/i-forgot-to-worry/), or a [work meeting](https://www.gilespcroft.com/meetings-from-hell/), or an [interview](https://www.gilespcroft.com/storm-before-the-calm/), or the [future in general](https://www.gilespcroft.com/going-fishing/)… or anything! It's all thought. It's all *so* real—it's your ‘reality’ in that moment, and there's literally [no escaping it](https://www.gilespcroft.com/illusion/)—but it's **not true**. > **Be(a)ware!** What strikes me, looking back on this farce, is that the bits of the day when I was thinking hardest—failing to experience an entire lay-by; wracking my brains to construct a fiction around the ‘missing vehicle’—were when I saw the least. And the part of the day when I was properly alive—laughing and marvelling at the ridiculousness of the human condition on the drive home; having fun with my wife—was when I'd stopped actively trying to do *anything* with my thinking. So the next time you find yourself with a watertight case for a ‘disaster’ on your hands, be mindful of this little story and just ask yourself if there might possibly be a ‘second lay-by’ you've innocently run past. Because it never *was* my car that got nicked. It was my attention. 💟 Giles p.s. everyone reading this will have used their biases, conditioning and past experiences to construct a unique story… I hope you enjoyed it! SIGN UP FOR THE DAILY REMINDERS newsletter [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/f3/9bf3d316-7d32-494b-814f-a7d94d6358c3/content/images/2025/12/DR_Lockup-Black-1.png)](#/portal/signup) Want to receive helpful, insightful content like this, regularly? The ****Daily Reminder** is a quick, lighthearted email that arrives in your inbox, and helps you to start **your* day in the right frame of mind. **“They feel like a moment of stillness in a world of madness.” \~* Neil, UK 🎁 Also included automatically when you sign up: an ****Introduction to Innate Health** ****Series** of 8 short lessons, designed to help you **‘Think less, and live more’.* **“One of those small things with big impact. Honestly, just sign up!”* \~ Paula, UK [GET YOURS NOW ](#/portal/signup) ### Related [Expectations and realityThat one time I leveraged the power of the 3 Principles to play a scandalously mean trick on my mum 😂![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/f3/9bf3d316-7d32-494b-814f-a7d94d6358c3/content/images/icon/DR_Lockup-Black-3-86f9775b-8cb9-42e1-8be5-097e17465d02.png)The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9b/f3/9bf3d316-7d32-494b-814f-a7d94d6358c3/content/images/thumbnail/2025-09-25-Expectations-and-reality-374de6a4-21b2-4974-af93-6f448c17d8ff.jpg)](https://www.gilespcroft.com/expectations-and-reality/) More Crofty hi-jinks, fuelled by the power of thought 😉