Reassessing choices on the twentieth anniversary of September 11th.
In 2001, I was on a plane, over the middle of the Pacific, returning from a month of adventures in Asia on my post-Bar trip, heading back toward New York City for what I knew (from having worked before as a legal assistant at a BigLaw firm) was going to be an intensely demanding job. After a days-long detour to Vancouver, by myself, away from everyone that I loved, and able only to see home weepingly through the relentless news footage alone in a hotel room, battling jetlag, I resumed my trip on September 14th when American airspace reopened.
Weeks later, I finally began that first BigLaw job as an attorney on October 1st. I came prepared with rubber soled flat loafers that I kept under my desk - just in case I needed to run up or down stairs and walk miles toward home (and I used them two years later during the blackout of 2003) - and a piece from a newspaper, probably the New York Times, written in the days after 9/11, that I had clipped and hung on my office bulletin board - one of those pieces searching for meaning in it all and reminding its readers to take and make time for the important things and people, and not take life for granted.
Over these two decades, I would give myself a C, at best, maybe only a C-, at heeding that advice. The hamster wheel is really hard to get off of once you start running it.
I considered having a somber day on the 11th, and, superstitiously, not scheduling anything risky; I considered just tackling the backlog of work now ever near with remote office technology. Instead, I watched the ceremonies in the morning, went out to look for the Tribute in Light in the evening, and in between went zip lining for the first time, with a friend, and saw Mama Hen and Papa Rooster en route home, and retrieved a bunch of my plant babies from their yard to repopulate the Jardin (now cleared for use after the summer’s building-mandated construction project).
I choose life, and love, because I can - when those were robbed of so many others. And I will try to rededicate myself to making that choice more regularly - work myself toward a B, maybe someday an A. There really isn’t a reason or a meaning all those lives were lost, or for the collateral damage since. But while we are here, we get to make certain choices, and to choose to support others when we see them opting toward life and love, rather than fear and anger. And I hope my choices in that direction will be supported, and, if not, that I will nonetheless have the courage to forge ahead in that direction anyway.
