Returning to Jonathan Livingston Seagull

A reflection by Jean Pierre Magro reminded me of something Richard Bach taught me many years ago.

Not because I expected to discover something new.

But because some books deserve to be revisited—not to find different answers, but to discover whether they still awaken the same part of us.

It always does.

I’ve never thought it was really a book about a seagull.

To me, it’s a book about freedom.

The freedom to question what everyone else has quietly accepted as inevitable.

Jonathan didn’t simply learn to fly.

He learned to stop mistaking other people’s limits for his own.

Perhaps that’s why it still feels quietly alive.

We live in an age where almost any question can be answered in seconds.

Yet no technology can do the one thing that has always belonged to us alone:

To remain with a question long enough for the answer to become unmistakably our own.

Every time I return to that book, something shifts.

The world hasn’t changed.

I have.

Life asks a little more of me than I had remembered.

The horizon feels a little farther away.

Not because it has moved…

But because I’ve remembered it’s still there.

And somehow, that makes me want to follow it again.

They don’t hand us wings.

They simply remind us we never truly lost them.

Some books end with the last page.

The rare ones begin there.

—Copí