"It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you might somehow be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost"
About this Quote
Bach’s line is self-help with a pilot’s sensibility: stop flying circles around your own cockpit, and the horizon widens. The opening clause, “if you can manage it,” is doing sly work. It admits that self-obsession isn’t just vanity; it’s habit, anxiety, survival strategy. Happiness isn’t framed as a prize you earn through flawless enlightenment, but as something that appears when attention is redirected away from the endlessly narrated self.
The quote’s engine is a controlled provocation: “make room” suggests that most lives aren’t empty of meaning but overcrowded with self-concern. Bach isn’t attacking self-regard; he’s arguing against self-centrality. “Someone as important to you as yourself” is deliberately symmetrical, refusing the saintly fantasy of total self-erasure while still demanding a radical recalibration. In a culture that treats boundaries as moral virtue and autonomy as identity, he’s proposing attachment as an antidote to drift.
The subtext is quietly communal, even anti-heroic. “Searching and lost” evokes the modern condition Bach often writes around: the spiritual seeker who mistakes motion for direction. The line implies that relentless self-focus manufactures more questions than it answers, turning introspection into a hall of mirrors. Contextually, it fits Bach’s broader project (from Jonathan Livingston Seagull onward): a spirituality that’s not institutional but interpersonal, where transcendence isn’t found by climbing above others, but by finally letting another person matter enough to interrupt your private monologue.
The quote’s engine is a controlled provocation: “make room” suggests that most lives aren’t empty of meaning but overcrowded with self-concern. Bach isn’t attacking self-regard; he’s arguing against self-centrality. “Someone as important to you as yourself” is deliberately symmetrical, refusing the saintly fantasy of total self-erasure while still demanding a radical recalibration. In a culture that treats boundaries as moral virtue and autonomy as identity, he’s proposing attachment as an antidote to drift.
The subtext is quietly communal, even anti-heroic. “Searching and lost” evokes the modern condition Bach often writes around: the spiritual seeker who mistakes motion for direction. The line implies that relentless self-focus manufactures more questions than it answers, turning introspection into a hall of mirrors. Contextually, it fits Bach’s broader project (from Jonathan Livingston Seagull onward): a spirituality that’s not institutional but interpersonal, where transcendence isn’t found by climbing above others, but by finally letting another person matter enough to interrupt your private monologue.
Quote Details
| Topic | Soulmate |
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