“…You must widen your gaze. I’m concerned you underestimate the gravity of coming events.” ~ Moriarty
Pre 9/11, I was blissfully ignorant of anything that could be even remotely construed as a geopolitical perspective. I was 30ish, working for a corporation that was easily recognized as a household name, and had just relocated to Southern California from the East Coast. Essentially, I was living the dream…
The day the planes hit The Towers, I was conducting a sales meeting at one of my distributor’s facilities in Arizona. When the meeting wrapped, we found some of the administrative staff gathered around a portable TV on top of the refrigerator in their lunchroom. “Can you believe this? Some idiot actually crashed their plane into one of the towers! How could they not know where they were going?”, someone asked. We all hovered around the TV for a few minutes, speculating about how someone could be so clueless as to fly into a building. Then, we all watched as the second plane hit and as they say, the rest is history.
My boss called me about 15 minutes after that second plane hit and told me that I might as well go back to my hotel and plant myself in front of the TV because there was no use in pretending it would be “business as usual” for the next couple of days, so that’s what I did. And just like that, my “living the dream” started fading in the rearview mirror.
Post 9/11 I made up my mind that whatever else I might do with my life from that point forward, I would commit to becoming a permanent student of the world I live in. I was determined that “the next time” something like that happened, I wouldn’t be so completely blindsided. What follows are the results of that ongoing commitment.
Welcome.