Remembering

There are mornings that pass through history, and there are mornings that history never quite passes through.

September 11 is one of those.

So many years have gone by now that a child born after that morning can be fully grown, with children of their own. The skyline has changed. Buildings have risen. Names have been carved into stone. Grass grows where rubble once lay. Life, as it always does, has found its way forward.

But remembering is not the same as looking backward.

Sometimes remembering is how we decide who we will be today.

I was reminded recently of the enormity of the suffering that occurred that morning. I did not lose a husband, a child, a sister, a brother, or a dear friend. My life was not split into a before and an after in the way it was for thousands of families. I went home to the people I loved.

And yet, all these years later, I feel something like a debt.

Not a debt of guilt, but one of gratitude.

I think of the firefighters walking upward while everyone else was coming down. The police officers, paramedics, office workers and ordinary strangers who reached for one another in smoke and confusion. I think of the men and women aboard Flight 93 who, understanding what was happening, chose courage over helplessness and tried to stop their plane from being used to take still more innocent lives.

Imagine the courage required in those final moments.

There was no time to prepare a speech about bravery. No time to become the kind of person one hopes to be someday. There was only the moment itself, asking: What will you do now?

Perhaps that is what stays with me most.

Life is always asking us that same question, although usually much more quietly.

What will you do now?

When someone is frightened, will you comfort them?

When something is wrong, will you speak?

When anger rises inside you, will you feed it, or will you find another way?

When kindness is inconvenient, will you offer it anyway?

When the world seems divided into sides and tribes and arguments, will you remember that beneath all the noise is another human being who wants to live, love, be safe, raise their children, and make it home at the end of the day?

The great lessons of our lives rarely arrive when we have arranged ourselves neatly to receive them. They come through the broken places. They come through loss. They come through mornings we would give anything to undo.

September 11 showed us the very worst of what human beings can do to one another.

But it also showed us something else.

It showed us people carrying strangers down flights of stairs.

People opening their homes.

People standing in impossible lines to give blood.

People cooking for rescue workers, searching through rubble, hanging photographs on walls, calling names into crowds, praying in churches and synagogues and mosques and living rooms.

For a little while, we seemed to remember something we are always in danger of forgetting:

We belong to one another.

Grief stripped away many of the things we normally use to separate ourselves. Politics mattered less. Status mattered less. Money mattered less. The labels we so carefully attach to ourselves seemed very small beside the fact that someone was missing from the dinner table.

And perhaps there is a lesson in that.

We do not have to wait for tragedy to remember what matters.

We do not have to lose something before we recognize its value.

Life is precious precisely because it is not promised.

The person sitting across from you will not always be there.

Neither will you.

This is not a dark thought. I believe it can be one of the most liberating truths we ever accept. When we understand that our days are numbered, even though we do not know the number, we begin to ask better questions.

Did I love enough?

Did I forgive?

Did I speak when silence would have been easier?

Did I make someone feel less alone?

Did I notice the ordinary miracle of waking up this morning?

Did I use this life only for myself, or did I leave some corner of the world gentler because I passed through it?

Those men and women whose lives ended on September 11 did not know, when they tied their shoes or poured their coffee or kissed someone goodbye that morning, that these would be their final ordinary acts.

That knowledge should not frighten us.

It should awaken us.

It should make us less willing to waste our lives on grudges that have long outlived their usefulness. Less eager to be right at the expense of being kind. Less comfortable turning away when another person needs us.

And perhaps it should make us brave enough to live at our highest level, not the highest level of achievement, wealth, recognition or success, but of humanity.

To show up.

To speak up.

To help.

To forgive.

To protect.

To love.

To find kindness within ourselves precisely when kindness is difficult.

Because courage does not only belong to burning buildings and doomed airplanes. There is courage in an apology. Courage in standing beside someone who has been pushed aside. Courage in refusing hatred when hatred is being handed to you like an inheritance.

There is courage in keeping your heart open.

That may be one of the greatest ways we can honor those who died.

Not merely with flags or ceremonies or a moment of silence, as important as those things are, but with the manner in which we live the other 364 days of the year.

We remember them when we choose compassion.

We remember them when we protect one another.

We remember them when we notice someone struggling and stop long enough to ask if they are all right.

We remember them when we refuse to believe that cruelty is inevitable.

Every life lost that morning was an entire universe to somebody.

A mother.

A father.

A son.

A daughter.

A friend who answered the phone.

A person who knew the family joke.

Someone whose shoes waited by the door.

Someone expected home.

Every one of them deserves to be remembered.

And those of us who were given more mornings have been given something along with them: the opportunity to live.

Really live.

To grow. To serve. To become more loving than we were yesterday. To understand that beneath our differences runs something deeper and older that connects us all.

September 11 taught us painfully that a single morning can change everything.

Perhaps remembering it can change something still.

Perhaps it can remind us to stop postponing kindness.

To say the words.

Make the call.

Offer the hand.

Speak against cruelty.

Stand beside the frightened.

Love the people who are here while they are still here.

And when the world asks us, as it eventually asks every one of us,

What will you do now?

May we have the courage to answer with our lives.

Hari Om Tat Sat