Beautiful Days, Lessons to Learn

Sometimes, on beautiful days like this one where the sun shines high and the sky burns the bluest blue, it is hard for me not to hearken back to another sunny and perfect day: September 11, 2001. It is not the actual details of that day that haunt me, though of course it is in my mind. It is more the feelings and thoughts in my own life, before those planes hit the buildings, before we all changed forever.

On the way to law school that morning, while I admired the breathtaking brightness of the day, I rounded a turn in my Grand Am and was met with a semi-truck barreling toward me, across the center line, in my lane. At just that minute my breath caught in my chest for that milli-second I wondered if we would collide - and then, the truck righted itself and continued safely past me.

There never appeared a serious threat, only that glitch in time when I didn't know if the truck would veer left or right, to safety or catastrophe. I inhaled in relief and thought, "That's how fast it happens. People die in those seconds. I wouldn't die like that, right? Because I live a charmed life. But, still, I bet the people who die in those seconds believe they live a charmed life, too, right up to the moment of death. Wow. You just never know."

I got to school safe and sound. During that first class, our professor said the following in regards to why late court filings would be excused: "For example, when the World Trade Center was bombed some years ago, those days would not count." Strangely, a few minutes later I would emerge from that class to a different world, to a new kind of example of tragic circumstances.

All the death on that day reminded me repeatedly of my earlier experience: Right before something really bad happens, in a moment that separates life from the beyond, does everyone hold out hope it won't happen to them? Because they live a charmed life? When do you realize that, charmed life or not, things are not going to veer back to safety at the last second?
Before I laid down to sleep that night, I reached for a "dream journal" so that I might recount my thoughts on the day, detail what I learned about the relishment of life. But I could not get beyond my own slight scare that morning, eons from where I was that night. I could not rectify what had happened a few hours after that, could not wrap my brain around the things I had seen on television, the stories I had heard, and how it all seemed eerily cooincidental.

I still can't, except to say this: How mundane go the days when our reality shifts beneath us forever. Beautiful afternoons like this one are meant to be breathed in deeply and used as reminders to be grateful for the charmed lives we do indeed live.

And to never lose sight that, yes, sometimes things do change in a second.