When Reality Isn’t a Straight Line
A friend sent me Jonathan Livingston Seagull the other day—the kind of light, breezy gesture you respond to with a smile… until it stirs a memory you didn’t know was still breathing. For me, it unlocked a whole bookshelf buried 25 years behind me: Richard Bach’s One, lying there like an old friend who kept the lights on even when I was too young to understand half of what I was reading. And somehow—maybe it’s age, maybe it’s clarity—I found myself drawing parallels between Bach’s wild, metaphysical wanderings and the teachings I grew up with in the Qur’an. Two worlds that, on the surface, shouldn’t even sit in the same conversation. But inside, if you tilt your head just a little, they hum the same truths. This isn’t theology. It’s just memory meeting meaning. When Life Stops Behaving Like a Straight Line I remember reading One as a teenager and feeling both confused and comforted. Bach talks about reality splitting and folding—parallel lives, alternate choices, endless “wh...