Richard Bach - Nothing by Chance

Very slowly, years passing while I struggled to earn a living with a bargain-basement typewriter, the biplane changed in the square cocoon of its hangar.

Fuselage finished. Wings attached and rigged. Tail on. Engine mounted. New cowling.

And then the day came that the old propeller on the new engine jerked around in a blurred silver streak, and very suddenly the biplane, two years dead, was alive again, bouncing hard echoes off the hangar doors. Up ahead in the roar and the wind, the black rocker-arms clicked up and down, spraying new grease back from their uncovered boxes.

So long dead, and I was alive. So long chained, and I was free.

At last, the answer why. The lesson that had been so hard to find, so difficult to learn, came quick and clear and simple. The reason for problems is to overcome them. Why, that’s the very nature of man, I thought, to press past limits, to prove his freedom. It isn’t the challenge that faces us, that determines who we are and what we are becoming, but the way we meet the challenge, whether we toss a match at the wreck or work our way through it, step by step, to freedom.

And behind it, I thought, lifting the biplane up once again into the sky, lies not blind chance but a principle that works to help us understand, a thousand “coincidences” and friends come to show us the way when the problems seem too hard to solve alone.

True for me, true for my country America.

We turned gently about a cloud, and flashed sunlight, a mile in the air, setting course for the towns of Nebraska.

Problems for overcoming. Freedom for proving. And, as long as we believe in our dream, nothing by chance.

ONE

THE BRIDGE ACROSS FOREVER: A LOVE STORY

A GIFT OF WINGS

ILLUSIONS: THE ADVENTURES OF A RELUCTANT MESSIAH

BIPLANE

NOTHING BY CHANCE

STRANGER TO THE GROUND

JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL

THERE’S NO SUCH PLACE AS FAR AWAY

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.