Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

BOOK REVIEW:

How many times have you looked at your bookshelves and drifted past well-read books covered in dust without much hope of being reread?

It was by chance that my finger brushed upon this long ago favourite and as Christmas approaches this is the type of feel-good novel for that most magical time.

Jonathon Livingston Seagull is an allegorical fable novella written by author Richard Bach and illustrated by Russell Munson.

This book was recommended to me by friends in college, so memories are tinted with that youthful exuberance that we all feel when we realise we are becoming who we will be.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a book about the dreams, hopes, a search for freedom, perseverance, confidence, a sense of achievement, ambition, humility and respect of one young seagull.

His parents and flock do not understand him; although he respects his parents and elders he never wavers in his personal goals.

Soar with thoughts of wind and wonder as you see the sea and sky and people shrink to small dots; this is a book that can change your life – read it twice.

Bach said the book came to him as “a visionesque spooky thing”.

He stopped after he wrote 10 pages and didn’t pick it up again for a few years.

The book was rejected by several publishers before Eleanor Friede at Macmillan said: “I think it has a chance of growing into a long-lasting standard book for readers of all ages”.

She convinced Macmillan to buy it.

Book sellers didn’t know how to classify it.

Nature, religion, photography, children’s books?

The advice they received was “put it next to the cash register”.

Jonathan is a seagull like any other but with one difference; the other gulls fly for food – he loves to fly so that he can explore, overcome his limitations, learn new skills and have the freedom to be himself.

Here are 10 self-realisation lessons we can learn from Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

• 1. Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you; look with your understanding.
• 2. Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts; for this gull it was not eating that mattered, but flight.
• 3. We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence, intelligence, and skill.
• 4. Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting or power in the flock?
• 5. We choose our next world through what we learn in this one.
• 6. You’ve got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself.
• 7. You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way.
• 8. See the real gull – the good in everyone – and help them see it in themselves.
• 9. His one sorrow was not solitude; it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them.
• 10. Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short.

Julie Chessman