my classroom and jumping at every sniffle and cough, I was now exiled to one room of my house, only leaving on occasion with a mask covering my face and unable to hug my babies and sleep next to my husband.
They Are Just Children In Adult Bodies
When I watch high school and college athletics, I see children. I see children with adult bodies and adolescent brains trying to achieve great things. When they lose, I see their pain and heartbreak and hurt for them, even when it’s the opposing team. (And yes, that even included the Ohio State players that I watched crumble in the final moments of their first loss in ten years to Michigan.) When they win, I remember that it’s not my victory, but theirs, and they are just letting the rest of us celebrate with them.
Do We Really Need All the Stuff?
years of a pandemic, after two years of so much talk about what was and was not working for us before we even heard of coronavirus, after two years of asking what a “new normal” could look like, can we possibly start talking about a paradigm shift away from this materialistic way of looking at our “needs” and the economy?
Whatever Happened to Curiosity?
Curiosity takes a significant amount of vulnerability because we’re always taking a chance that we might have been wrong. We’re allowing ourselves to learn something new that may turn everything else upside down. It takes a lot of mental, emotional, and psychological work to process all that we discover along the way. And it requires humility both when we discover we need to change our perspective and when we receive confirmation that we were right all along, a level of humility that very few of us possess in large quantities.
What Are We Remembering?
On this 20th anniversary, and every anniversary that follows, let us remember September 11, 2001 as a time of grief and unity, fear and hope, hatred and love, terror and resurrection. Let us embrace the both/and of the event that changed all of our lives so that our children can fully understand the moment that shaped their future.
Hindsight Completes the Narrative
Hindsight can only truly be 20/20 if we are given the necessary space to find the language to describe our grief and our triumphs. It can only truly be 20/20 if we are honest with each other and ourselves about how the experience has, or has not, impacted us. And it can only be truly 20/20 if we stop to listen to the experiences of others.