Running from Safety: A Memoir

Overview
Richard Bach’s Running from Safety: A Memoir revisits the terrain that made him famous in Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions, but turns the lens inward. It is part autobiography, part spiritual conversation, and part parable about fear, freedom, and the price of staying comfortable. The book follows Bach as a seasoned pilot and writer who has built a life with his wife Leslie, yet senses that the habits he calls “safety” have quietly narrowed his world. The central question is simple and unsettling: how much of a life is forfeited when one refuses risk in the name of security?

The Encounter with the Child Self
The memoir’s framing device is an imagined reunion with Bach’s nine-year-old self, “Dickie,” whose sudden presence interrupts the routines of adult certainty. Dickie insists on a contract: teach me everything you know, tell the truth, and don’t dodge. The agreement compels Bach to translate his hard-won convictions into plain language a child can test. What begins as a mentorship reverses, as Dickie refuses answers that sound like slogans and presses for stories, evidence, and lived proof.

Their dialogue moves between the present and scenes from Bach’s past: early Air Force days, barnstorming summers, the fragile beginnings of a marriage, and the solitary discipline of writing. Each memory becomes an object lesson Dickie takes apart, What did you fear? How did you choose? What did it cost?, until Bach recognizes that he has been postponing risks even while preaching freedom. In giving the child the best of his wisdom, he must also confront the comfortable fictions he tells himself.

Lessons, Risks, and Love
Running from safety does not celebrate recklessness; it demands responsibility. The book draws a line between danger that dulls awareness and risk that awakens it. Bach argues that real safety is found in attention, integrity, and self-trust, not in hedges against uncertainty. He tells Dickie that we are free to choose, that consequences are teachers, and that fear often points toward the next necessary step. The conversations range into questions of God and death, which Bach treats less as doctrines than as experiments in perception: if life is a learning adventure chosen by the soul, then loss and change are passages, not punishments.

Threaded through is his relationship with Leslie, continuing the love story he chronicled earlier. Love is not a refuge from risk but a field where it is most clearly felt, keeping promises, telling difficult truths, and allowing another person to see the unvarnished self. Dickie’s questions about love are bracingly practical: How do you know it’s love? How do you keep it? The answers return to presence, honesty, and the courage to start again when habits close in.

Voice and Structure
The narrative alternates between crisp, sometimes playful dialogue and reflective prose, with episodes of flight, hang gliders, small planes, the clean geometry of sky, standing in for the exhilaration and vulnerability of choice. Bach’s style is spare and aphoristic, but the child’s skepticism keeps the book anchored. Whenever a sentence drifts toward uplift, Dickie asks what it means at ground level.

Closing Notes
By the end, teacher and student have traded places often enough that the boundary dissolves. Dickie does not disappear; he integrates, becoming the alertness that notices when “safety” is a mask for fear. Bach emerges with fewer certainties and a deeper trust in attention, love, and deliberate risk. The memoir’s quiet claim is that running from safety is not a stunt but a practice: a daily choosing toward aliveness, with eyes open to the cost and the gift.