The Books: “Running from Safety” (Richard Bach)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit – by Richard Bach. Hmmm. Man speaks with inner child for length of book. Hmmm. I imagine if you said to me, “Sheila, you’ve gotta read this book – it’s an extended dialogue between a man and his own inner child” – I would have to punch you in the face. Merely for misunderstanding my personality and my taste to such a deep level. HOWEVER. I bought it because Richard Bach wrote it (naturally) – and I always put my name and the date of purchase on the front page of every book I buy (it’s kind of obsessive) – and I see that I bought this one in December 1995 – and I imagine read it like a banshee immediately upon purchase – The date goes a long way towards explaining the impact the book had on me. I had just uprooted myself – yet again. A huge love affair had ended and I was a WRECK. I was living in my brother’s apartment in New York. I had left Chicago. My stuff was in storage. I was in school all day long. NOTHING was familiar to me. The everyday details of my life were all different … and there were times when I felt completely unmoored. The whole “running from safety” concept was something I had begun to LIVE … not because of the book or anything, but just because that’s how life goes somehow. Run from safety. RUN. What a rush. But man, sometimes it’s hard. I really needed to hear the message in this book at that particular time. It’s all about leaving Ye Olde Comforte Zone. It’s all about taking risks. And honoring the dreams that you had as a small child. Because some people forget, you know. You forget.

I’m not sure if this book would have as great an impact on me now. I’m way more cynical than I was back then. But who knows … hopefully you are NEVER done with personal growth.

In this book, Richard, with Leslie’s encouragement, opens the door to this dungeon-like room in his imagination – and that is where his 8 year old self has been suffering for 45 years, or whatever. And that 8 year old Dickie is PISSED. He has been abandoned. Richard (with his neuroses, and his yearning for perfection) is put off by the kids rage. He refers to it as “He was pretty annoyed” and Leslie basically laughs at him. “Annoyed? You call that annoyed?” Anyway, she thinks he needs to open that door … let the child out again. So Richard and his younger self start hanging out – and the younger self asks questions, and Richard answers, and they talk about all kinds of things – love and death and physics and flight … Richard dredges up memories of what it was like to BE this 8 year old (the memories are the weakest parts of the book, if I recall) – and I’m not sure how it ends … I can’t remember. This Dickie is, naturally, imaginary – but Richard had been walking around for the majority of his life ignoring him. Ignoring the fact of his existence.

Here’s an excerpt – a conversation between Richard and Dickie. This is my last Bach book on the shelf – it’s been wonderful talking with Richard Bach fans about him this last couple of days. I realized that somewhere along the line, in my travels and my moving, I got rid of the books I have of his flying writing – the compilations of essays he’s written about aviation. Gift of Wings – Stranger to the Ground – some of the essays are rather boring, but some are sheer poetry: stories of barnstorming, of being a pilot … wonderful stuff. I think I need to get those books again.

And I know I’m just guessing here, but it’s a theory: In each of his major books, Richard has basically created another character who is a perfect friend. And not only a perfect friend – but someone who will listen to him. Donald Shimoda … and then Leslie Parrish (I know she’s real, but still – he casts her as a “character” in his story) – and in this book – Dickie. And as you can see in the excerpt below – Bach is moving away from plot, from reality. Most of this is just Dickie asking questions and Bach spouting off about his theories. I don’t mean to criticize – and a lot of his ideas are things I have NEEDED to hear at certain points in my life … but if you read this conversation below, and then think of some of the long extended conversations with Leslie in Bridge Across Forever and you’ll see the difference. Dickie – as a child – a student – is a captive audience. Bach gets to be the teacher. He talks and talks and talks. Leslie doesn’t let him get away with that in Bridge. She is equally a teacher. And her lessons come to him like bolts from the blue … because he is a bit arrogant, and truly believes that his “truth” is the only “truth”. So when Leslie comes along and smacks him out of that – it blows him away. He is a closed system, this Richard Bach – even with all of his out of body experiences, and theories. It’s a closed system.

So this book might be a harbinger of things to come for him (and for Leslie). He no longer is interested in talking to someone real. He is back to making up imaginary people for conversations such as the one below.

It’s just a theory. Like I said – I got a lot out of this book. I was pretty miserable in December 1995 – even though the changes I had made were all very good and necessary. But oh, I yearned for Chicago, and the man I had left, and all my friends, and M., and Wayne Street … my whole LIFE was back there! So to read a book about “running from safety” at that point was really good for me. It came along at just the right time.

Oh, and for me? The Principle of Coincidence is something that I have used over and over and over and over … It’s sort of become a way of life now, I would say. It’s just part of me, part of how I operate, part of how I navigate slings and arrows, et al.

Excerpt from Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit – by Richard Bach.

“Are you a master?” he asked.

“Of course I am! Me and you and everybody else. But we forget.”

“How do they do it?” he said.

“How does who do what?”

“How do masters change their lives at will?”

I smiled at the question. “Power tools.”

“Pardon?”

“Another difference between masters and victims is that victims haven’t learned power tools and masters use ’em all the time.”

“Electric drills? Buzz saws?” He was adrift, asking for help. A good teacher would have left him alone to puzzle it out, but I’m too chatty to teach.

“Not buzz saws. Choice. The enchanted blade, with an edge that shapes lifetimes. Yet if we’re afraid to choose anything but what we’ve got, what good is choice? Might as well leave choice wrapped up in its box, don’t bother to read the instructions.”

“Who’s afraid to use it?” he said. “What’s scary about choice?”

“It makes us different!”

“Oh, come on …”

“Okay, don’t choose,” I said. “Do what everyone else would do, every minute of your life. What happens?”

“I go to school.”

“Yes. And?”

“I graduate.”

“Yes. And?”

“I get a job.”

“Yes. And?”

“I get married.”

“Yes. And?”

“I have children.”

“Yes. And?”

“I help them through school.”

“Yes. And?”

“I retire.”

“Yes. And?”

“I die.”

“And when you die, listen to your last words.”

He thought about those. “So what.”

“Even though you do everything that everyone expects you to do: you’re a law-abiding citizen, you’re the perfect husband and father, you vote, you give to charity, you’re kind to animals. You live what they expect and you die from so what?”

“Hm.”

“Because you never chose your life, Dickie! You You never asked for change, you never asked what you loved and you never found it, you never hurled yourself into the world that mattered most to you, never fought dragons that you thought could eat you up, never inched yourself out on cliffsides clinging by the tips of your skill a thousand feet over destruction because your life was there anad you had to bring it home from terror! Choice, Dickie! Choose what you love and chase it at top speed and I your future do solemnly promise that you will never die from so what!”

He looked at me sideways. “Are you trying to convince me?”

“I’m trying,” I said, “to turn you astray from Going Along. I owe that to you.”

“What if I do it? What happens if I learn choosing from myself, no matter what other people say, and I go out there on the cliffs. Will your magic blade keep me safe?”

I sighed. “Dickie, when did safety become your ambition? Running from safety is the only way to make your last word Yes!”

“The sycamore tree,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

” … in the front yard. It’s always there, it’s always safe. When I’ms cared I’d give anything to be that tree. When I’m not I couldn’t stand the dull life.”

The tree lives there yet, I thought, bigger than he’d know it, leafier, lasted another half century by digging its feet ever deeper in the dirt.

“Run from safety doesn’t mean destroy yourself,” I said. “You don’t strap on a racing plane until you learn to fly a Cub first. Little choices, little adventures before big ones. But one day comes the middle of an air race, in the wide-open blast-furnace roar of this monster engine, the world’s a steep green blur fifty feet down, you’re pulling six G’s around the pylons and all at once you remember: I chose this minute to happen to me! I built this life! I wanted it more than anything else, I crawled and walked and ran to get it and now it’s here!”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Do I have to risk my life?”

“Of course you do! With every choice you risk the life you would have had; with every decision, you lose it. Sure, an alternate Dickie in an alternate world splits away and lives what you might have chosen, but that’s his choice, not yours. In school and business and marriage, in any adventure you pick, if you care what your last words will be, you trust what you know and you dare toward your hope.”

“And if I’m wrong,” he said, “I die.”

“If you want security,” I said, “you’ve come to the wrong arena. The only security is Life Is, and that’s all that matters. Absolute, unchanging, perfect. But Security in Appearance? Even the sycamore falls to dust, someday.”

He gritted his teeth, his face a panic of worry-lines.

I laughed at the look. “The wood disintegrates, the symbol vanishes, not the spirit of its life. The belief of your body shatters, not the believer who shaped it.”

“Maybe my spirit loves change,” he said. “My body hates it.”

I remembered. Safe and warm, under the covers, six-thirty sound asleep in the winter morning, and BOBBY! DICKIE! RISE AND SHINE! READY FOR SCHOOL! and if I’d struggle awake, swear that if I ever grew up I would never get out of bed before noon. Same in the Air Force: alert siren goes off, wired to my pillow at two in the morning HONGA-HONGA-HONGA! and I am somehow supposed to wake up? and fly? an airplane? in the dark? Body: Not possible! Spirit: Do it! Now!

“Body hates change,” I Nodded. “But look at your body … every day a little taller, a little changed; Dickie melts upward into Richard, doomed to adulthood! No body’s destroyed more completely than a child’s grown up, Captain. Gone without a trace, no coffin, not even ashes left to mourn.”

“Help,” he said. “I need all the power tools I can get!”

“They’re already in your hands. What can you say to any appearance?”

“Life Is.”

“And?”

“And what?” he asked.

I hinted. “Choice.”

“And I can change appearances.”

“Within certain limits?”

“Limits heck!” he said. “I don’t have to breathe, if I don’t want to breathe! Where are your limits now?”

I shrugged.

“When masters don’t like the way things seem to be, Richard, why don’t they just stop breathing? Why don’t they just quit the world of Appearances hwen they run into a really hard problem, and go home?”

“Why quit when we can change the world? Declare Life Is, right in the face of appearance, draw enchanted Choice, and after a decent work-filled interval, the world changes.”

“Always?”

“Usually.”

The air went out of him. “Usually? You give me a magic formula and your guarantee is it usually works?”

“When it doesn’t, the Principle of Coincience shows up.”

“The principle of coincidence,” he said.

“You’ve chosen some life-affirming change in your immediate world of Appearance, let’s say. You decide changes will appear.”

He nodded.

“You declare Life Is, knowing it’s true, and you work your little heart out to transform what you will.”

He nodded.

“And it doesn’t change,” I said.

“I was going to ask.”

“Here’s what you do: You keep working, and you watch for coincidences to come strolling your way. Watch carefully, for it always comes in disguise.”

He nodded.

“And you follow that coincidence!”

Dickie was unmoved. “An example would help,” he said.

An example. “We need to walk through this brick wall, becuase it locks us into an appearance of life that we choose to change.”

He nodded.

“We work like crazy to change it, but our wall remains brick, and it gets if anything harder than ever. We’ve checked: there’s no secret door, no ladder, no shovel to dig under … solid brick.”

He agreed. “Solid brick.”

“Then be still and listen. Is that a faint muffled chugging behind us? Has yon bulldozer operator left an engine running during her lunch break and the machine slipped into double compound low gear? Is the machine coincidentally rumbling toward our wall?”

“I’m supposed to trust in coincidence?”

“Remember that this world is not reality. It’s a playground of appearances on which we practice overcoming seems-to-be with our knowing of Is. The Principle of Coincidence is a power tool that promises, in this playground, to take us to the other side of our wall.”