Tinkerbelle Tales… 04
45.5.21
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Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of
flight - how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it
is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not
eating that mattered, but flight.
-----
"See here Jonathan " said his father not unkindly. "Winter isn't far away. Boats will be few and the surface fish will be swimming deep. If you
must study, then study food, and how to get it. This flying business is
all very well, but you can't eat a glide, you know. Don't you forget that
the reason you fly is to eat."
Jonathan nodded obediently. For the next few days he tried to behave
like the other gulls; he really tried, screeching and fighting with the
flock around the piers and fishing boats, diving on scraps of fish and
bread. But he couldn't make it work.
It's all so pointless, he thought, deliberately dropping a hard-won
anchovy to a hungry old gull chasing him. I could be spending all this
time learning to fly. There's so much to learn!
-----
It took tremendous strength, but it worked. In ten seconds
he had blurred through ninety miles per hour. Jonathan had set a world
speed record for seagulls!
But victory was short-lived. The instant he began his pullout, the
instant he changed the angle of his wings, he snapped into that same
terrible uncontrolled disaster, and at ninety miles per hour it hit him
like dynamite. Jonathan Seagull exploded in midair and smashed down into a
brickhard sea.
-----
The voice faded, and Jonathan agreed. The place for a seagull at
night is on shore, and from this moment forth, he vowed, he would be a
normal gull. It would make everyone happier.
-----
He closed his eyes to slits against the wind and rejoiced. A hundred
forty miles per hour! And under control! If I dive from five thousand feet
instead of two thousand, I wonder how fast.. His vows of a moment before were forgotten, swept away in that great
swift wind. Yet he felt guiltless, breaking the promises he had made himself. Such promises are only for the gulls that accept the ordinary.
One who has touched excellence in his learning has no need of that kind of
promise. -----
"... one day Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you shall learn that
iresponsibility does not pay. Life is the unknown and the unknowable,
except that we are put into this world to eat, to stay alive as long as we
possibly can." -----
Jonathan Seagull spent the rest of his days alone, but he flew way
out beyond the Far Cliffs. ----- He learned more each day. He learned that a streamlined high-speed dive could bring him to find the rare and tasty fish that schooled ten feet
below the surface of the ocean. ----- then he understood... and passed on to a new understanding... -----
For a long time Jonathan forgot about the world that he had come
from, that place where the Flock lived with its eyes tightly shut to the
joy of flight, using its wings as means to the end of finding and fighting
for food. But now and then, just for a moment, he remembered. He remembered it one morning when he was out with his instructor,
while they rested on the beach after a session of folded-wing snap rolls "Where is everybody, Sullivan?" he asked silently, "Why aren't there more of us here? Why, where I came from there were.. "
"... thousands and thousands of gulls. I know. " Sullivan shook his
head. "The only answer I can see, Jonathan, is that you are pretty well a
one-in-a-million bird. Most of us came along ever so slowly. We went from
one world into another that was almost exactly like it, forgetting right
away where we had come from, not caring where we were headed, living for
the moment. 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? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our
purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth. The same
rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we
learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this
one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome." He stretched his wings and turned to face the wind. "But you, Jon,"
he said, "learned so much at one time that you didn't have to go through a
thousand lives to reach this one."
from Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
