All week we've been bombarded by images in the media over the 10-year anniversary of that terrible day. I had watched a few minutes on TV a few days ago, nearly started sobbing, and changed the channel.
I wasn't in New York ten years ago. I didn't know anyone who perished, or even know anyone by second or third degrees. Yet I'll always remember where I was and what I was doing that day, and in the days and weeks that followed. I am still haunted by the images of the destruction, and they are just as upsetting to me now as they were 10 years ago.
Well, I could talk about mourning the lost lives, or even celebrating the heroic moments...the memorials, the dedications, and the reflections. But other people have got that covered.
Well, it's the reflections, or self-reflection that I think about.
I am trying not to be an ageist...but it's something like this that makes me realize that there is a collective experience that my younger friends experienced...differently, shall we say, than I did. In other words, I'm not sure what it would have been like for me to have been in the ninth grade on September 11, 2001. Ninth grade was...a long time ago. September 11 was not.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, at about 7:40 a.m. Pacific Time, I got in my car in Los Angeles, with my ears glued to the news radio, and drove to work at a snail's pace along with everyone else on the 405. At that time, I worked in a tall-ish office building on Wilshire Boulevard, about half a block away from a Federal Building, which was surrounded by the National Guard. No one knew what was going on, and everyone was understandably freaking out. There's something to be said about working in an office building, and doing that every day, M-F, 8-5 grind, that made us relate to the futility of it all.
It could happen to us, we thought at the time. What is the point of work?
Prior to that day, I had spent about a year of my life in a crappy relationship, living in a crappy apartment, and working at a dead-end job. For what?
The video clips of mass amounts of white paper floating around the smoldering towers were what I saw on TV a few days ago that nearly made me cry. I thought immediately, of what I thought back then...that at some point, those papers were really important to someone. Someone, or some group of people, worked really hard on those papers. And now, they burst into the sky in a complete disarray, never to be looked at or used again. How important were they now, compared to the human lives that were simultaneously being destroyed?
A week later, on September 18, 2001, I quit my job, moved out of my apartment, and dumped my boyfriend.
I was already going to do the first two, but being reminded of the evanescence of life prompted the latter.
I'm not saying it was easy. We are creatures of habit, and I especially have always been slow to make adjustments to improve my happiness and well-being. Life is short, as the cliche goes. And never was it more blatantly broadcast to us than on that day.
Of course, in the years that followed I managed to settle into uninspiring routines again, and it took until August 2010 before I made any more drastic changes to my life.
So here I am now, in NYC.
Obviously there are a lot of terrible things in this world that we cannot control. But of the things we can, why not? Since there's only one life to live, live it to its fullest, don't settle for less than happy, and do whatever you can to make this world better for everyone and everything in it.
