Our daughter was born in July. We were sitting around that morning waiting for relatives to board their flight from California.
The phone rang. A mentor of mine. He asked me where I was.
"Home," I said.
"Something's going on in New York. I was thinking of you. Turn on the TV."
I asked what channel.
"Every channel."
That's when I saw the second plane hit the tower.
Our family's flight was delayed, with no word on when they'd get in. Behind our house was an emergency helicopter pad, a sound constant enough that we'd stopped hearing it. That day it went silent. We didn't realize how much that sound had woven itself into our life until it was gone.
I was consulting at a lighting company in New York at the time. My first trips back into the city were chaotic, armed guards at Penn Station, no PATH trains, cabs impossible to find. It took months before anything resembled normal.
The people I worked with there had been directly affected. One woman's apartment was down near Ground Zero. She told me how the debris had worked its way in through her windows and left a multi-inch coating across everything she owned. Everyone's life had changed, some far more than others.
What I remember most, looking back, isn't the tower or the silence or the guards. It's that we started asking each other real questions. How's your family. How are you holding up. And we actually listened to the answer. Not the way you do in business — out of habit, not really wanting to know.
It made people more human to me. More dimensional than they'd been the day before. I still carry that with me. I don't see people connecting with that same depth of concern anymore.
We ask each other how we're doing every day, dozens of times, without thinking twice. It took a tragedy to make us actually mean it.
Are you really listening?
