Late on September 7th it was decided that a couple of us technical folks would join our sales VP and the account salesman on a trip to see Morgan Stanley Dead Whitter in the North Tower on Tuesday Sept 11th. We were going to drive down on Sept 10th and be there first thing in the morning on Sept 11th to troubleshoot an odd issue with a particular touch screen controller and the interaction with a legacy system. Around noon on Sept 10th, it was decided to do a conference call in place of an on-site visit as they couldn't get pre-clearance for us from Corporate Security. We would instead drive down on Sept 11th and visit on Sept 12th.
The morning of Sept 11th, we started the call 8:30 call with a tech support team at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.
We exchanged niceties and got to work, narrowing down the issue to a couple of possibilities fairly quickly.
At 8:46, the line went dead.
Someone happened to be in the café across the hall from the office when the first reports started rolling in.
I called my fiancé (Wife and I were not yet married) then gathered in the café along with most of our company and watched the news pour in.
I guess my take away is that life changes every instant. Some are inconsequential, some monumental, and you have no say which sort of change you will encounter at any given moment.
Take time for the important things. Hugs from your kids, holding hands with a loved one by a fire, shared laughs with friends, your favorite pet lounging on your lap. Watching the sun rise or set over the lake, the mountains, the ocean. Seek wonder in the most mundane moments.
I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the novel "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles
"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."