“How much more there is to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there’s a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!”
This is from a book JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL written by the bestselling author Richard Bach. The simple story and the numerous beautiful photographs of seagulls that captivated me all my childhood and I learned a lesson or two about life and Meaning of Life from it.
The story is about a seagull and the decision it makes about his life, following is the most powerful passage of the book and the one around which the story revolves:
“Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great gull, an unlimited idea of freedom, and precision flying is a step towards expressing our real nature. Everything that limits us we have to put aside. That’s why all this high-speed practice, and low speed, and aerobatics…” “Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thoughts, and you break the chains of your body, too…”
This is from a book JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL written by the bestselling author Richard Bach. The simple story and the numerous beautiful photographs of seagulls that captivated me all my childhood and I learned a lesson or two about life and Meaning of Life from it.
The story is about a seagull and the decision it makes about his life, following is the most powerful passage of the book and the one around which the story revolves:
“Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great gull, an unlimited idea of freedom, and precision flying is a step towards expressing our real nature. Everything that limits us we have to put aside. That’s why all this high-speed practice, and low speed, and aerobatics…” “Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thoughts, and you break the chains of your body, too…”
The photo is PERFECT! I hope to respond later.
ReplyDeleteThank You!
I wanted to be a Bach completist once, and I might have collected some of his lesser known works as well. His novel ONE was an inspiration for me in some of my writings in the mid-1990s.
ReplyDeleteMustansar Hussain Tarar also told me once about his liking for Bach, although he emphasized more on the work which, according to him was the source for all such writings - "inn sub nay wahien say liya hai" - which is, of course, THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS, which happens to be another great favorite of our friend Akhtar Wasim Dar here :).
Again and again, I am amazed to learn and grow in the knowing of literature from all manner of places by both of you, Akhtar Wasim Dar Sahib and Khurram Ali Shafique Sahib. I will look up Back now decades after my first reading of Jonathan...- especially I hope to locate ONE...
ReplyDeleteI go now to the rest of my week with these liberating principles:
-That we are each actually a variation of the idea of the Great gull, an unlimited idea of freedom, and precision flying is a step towards expressing our real nature.
- That everything that limits us we have to put aside.
-That as we Break the chains of our thoughts, we can gain in momentum, grace, beauty and effectiveness here in our little mysterious lives of passage and transformation.