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Running from Safety
With Richard Bach
Part 3 of 3 Parts

THINKING ALLOWED
Conversations On The Leading Edge
Of Knowledge and Discovery
With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove
COPYRIGHT (C) 1998 THINKING ALLOWED PRODUCTIONS
Reprinted with permission from Thinking Allowed Productions

MISHLOVE: Flooding your imagination. You know, when I read these passages in Running from Safety, I thought about my own childhood, and realized I hadn't had any major traumas, but I realized, like practically every adult, I had left so many parts of me in the past, and so, so many memories I hadn't thought of
for years and years. The book was such a stimulus to begin thinking about this and remembering that, and awakening second grade and third grade.

BACH: I had brushed those away: "Those are kid stuff. I'm not interested in kid stuff. I'm interested in my sense of mission. I've got to make this discovery somehow before I die." But in those kid memories, and those things that Dickie handed to me, were critically important elements to understanding of why I'm
here. Why do I like to fly? I had a vague memory of a water tower on a ranch in Arizona where I lived for a while, where my family lived. There was this water tower, and my brothers would climb the water tower every day. It was 30 feet high, with a little windmill on the top, and it pumped water up into a tank. Every day we had to go up and check to see that the tank hadn't rusted through and we had enough water to last us, and so forth. So my two older brothers would climb that, but they'd say, "It's your turn, Dickie," and I couldn't do it. I was paralyzed with fright two rungs off the ground. I've since discovered that almost everyone who flies airplanes has a fear of heights. That was how I discovered it. And there was a time, completely forgotten until this incident, that I climbed that water tower, and there was no one there. I said, "If I die, all right, I die. But I must do that. I don't want to be a coward and live with that. I don't want to be a baby." A terrible thing for a six-year-old, to be a baby, or seven, or whatever I was. So I climbed that thing, and as I wrote, all those -- I mean, thought by
thought, the feeling of the wood, the feeling of the height, knowing that I had to throw my arm over this rung, and wait here and just stop and try to get my breath back, because now I'm ten feet off the ground and it's a long fall down, and then suddenly realizing even though I had my arm locked over the rung, it
could tear away from the ladder and I could fall off backwards. Oh God, this terrible fear! And don't look down, don't look down. Every step of that was vividly alive for me. Then something happened at the top of that ladder, when I said, "I know I'm going to die, but I am going to look down." And I turned, shivering, and looked down, and the top of our house -- way below now, way below -- it was the first time I'd ever seen a roof from the air, the first time I'd ever seen land from the air. There's our little burros; why, they look like little fluffy dolls! And the cactus aren't tall, menacing, thorny creatures. What a fluffy, dear little plant! And off to the mountains on the horizon: They're not so high above me, and they're calling me. And this, from the air, what I took so for granted and sometimes so forbidding, is beautiful! Life from the sky, Richard, is a totally different life! That memory I had utterly suppressed and forgotten, and always wondered, "Why is it that I'm drawn to the sky?" "I don't know; I guess I'm just nutty."

MISHLOVE: So when you looked back at your own childhood, you saw something pure and simple that profoundly affected your whole character.

BACH: Profoundly, to this day. And I remember other fragments going through as I was growing up -- this entrancement with the sky. I'd lie on the grass and look at the clouds and then imagine a little me on the cloud with a red flag, saying, "Hi, Dickie." And there'd be this yearning to get to that cloud. I didn't know
why.

MISHLOVE: There's an interesting paradox in Running from Safety, in which you purport to be the mentor and the teacher of the nine-year-old, but in the end it seems as if he has as much to offer.

BACH: That just so totally startled me. Again, it's imagination playing with us -- that as I was writing that, I had this sense. What would I say to the kid that I was? What really matters? What had I learned? So I told him that, and all along something held from me who this person really was. I was so sure he was Dickie, my younger self. It turns out, in writing the book, that he's someone else entirely, and he's someone who is not waiting for my teaching for his own sake, but waiting for my teaching for my sake. So often we don't know what we think until we say it. Samuel Johnson said, "I don't know what I think until I write it down." It's so true. And so in writing, in talking to him, I was telling Dickie what I knew. It turns out that Dickie is not Dickie at all. Dickie is one of my imaginary playmates, several of my imaginary playmates, of this space-time, right here, who is saying, "What do you know? Remind yourself of what you know, Richard. Find some imaginative way to discover what matters more to you than anything else in the world, what ideas. If you had to go to a desert island, what ideas would you take with you? And you have a very small valise. What will it be?" So that kind of discovery, that I had been the -- I thought I was playing with my imagination. My imagination was playing with me, and I loved it.

MISHLOVE: And there we get once again to the paradox. Is it fiction or is it fact? Your imagination was playing with you.

BACH: That is fact. That is simple fact. And as it played, the keyboard was under my hands, and the words were coming out on the screen.

MISHLOVE: I get the sense that when you sit down in front of your typewriter, you enter another world, or another state of consciousness.

BACH: Very much. It is literally -- I stop seeing. The world goes blurry, and it turns into this monitor, and I have a sense of this amorphous -- before I start to write it is just swirls in there. And then something happens, and what I see there is what I type. And so creatures, people, emerge from this mist, and I am drawn
into what they have to say and what they're doing. And I see very clearly, and the dialogue is heard dialogue. I don't make that up.

MISHLOVE: Oh, really?

BACH: And I know that as soon as I stop and think, it's bad, it's bad. I have to be on the run.

MISHLOVE: Then we come to the issue of letting go of thinking.

BACH: Yes, yes.

MISHLOVE: Well, in your letting go, Richard, I sense that you share so much of the fullness of who you are. It's such a pleasure to be with you now and feel the vibrancy of the adventure of your spirit.

BACH: It is so much -- when I was kid, I was saying, "If and when I grow up, will the fun go out of it?" If I could sing back across the years to him, it will never
go out of it.

MISHLOVE: Richard Bach, thanks so much for being with me.

BACH: Thank you, Jeff.

- END -

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