Posted: Friday, 11 September 2009 11:39AM
Life Is For Living
Steve Corbett Reporting
Friday, September 11, 2009
The federal agent with whom I was scheduled to meet that day in New York to talk about heroin trafficking into Wilkes-Barre got tied up on a case. So I sat for a couple of hours in a huge cafeteria at the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
The place was immense. People filled the room, eating and having coffee, coming and gong to their offices and their careers. I marveled at the size of the place. Even the stairs in one of the areas of the building seemed super wide and open. The elevators heading up to the observation deck were wide and open, too.
A few years later the towers exploded, burned and fell.
The faces of the people in the cafeteria that day remain a blur in my mind. They’re there but I don’t personally recognize any of them.
By the time the terrorist attack occurred eight years ago today, my buddy the cop had retired. Some of the men I met through him had escaped from their offices in the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms offices, marching dutifully down stairs that led them to life. And even though they made it out, their lives had changed forever.
But that happens even without a terrorist attack.
Life changes every second of every day.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, my New York friend’s 19-year-old son died from cancer. The last time we spoke he said that he and his wife were planning a divorce. He said he missed his job and if he had it to do over again would have never retired early.
But we don’t have it to do over again. We never have it to do over again. Life always moves on, leaving death behind us until it’s our turn. Ultimately, nobody get out of here alive.
I realize how depressing that sounds.
But it’s true.
And perhaps the best way we can pay respect and honor the dead of 9/11 is to respect each moment of our own lives and others, living as much as we can with awareness and a mindfulness that captures the essence of existence and contributes to the living.
I realize how heady that sounds.
But such mindfulness is helpful in coping with the horrors of the loss that came in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Central to the core of my personal spiritual development is the notion of interconnectedness and impermanence. Everything is connected and nothing lasts forever. We’re really just passing through, moving along a continuum that leads into that from which we came.
Thinking, feeling people are free to interpret life and death and I strongly encourage people to do just that.
But I worry that too many of us reject the challenge.
Thinking and feeling sometimes hurt.
But even the bad moments teach us that we are alive and breathing in that moment, ready to move on, even into the throes death. Of course such lofty contemplation is easier said than done. It takes practice to ponder the path.
But I caution you.
Do not squander your lives.
The journey is worth the effort. Appreciation of our blessings might make the end easier to take. Knowing that you tried to make the best of good and bad situations might help face the final moments when life is slipping away.
I once told a Buddhist monk that I practice Buddhism to learn to die well. His blank look in response could have meant anything. But it didn’t matter what he thought. It mattered what I thought. And I meant every word I said that day when I sat in a rural New York mountain monastery in deep thought engulfed by great feeling.
Today I wonder how many of those people I saw in the World Trade Center cafeteria got out alive. I wonder how much time those who did have left. I wonder how much time I have left. And I vow to make the best of it. I vow to keep thinking and feeling and talking about this wondrous world that could be so much better if only more of us tried to make the best of what we have.
Sitting in meditation this morning, I focused on my breath and tried to let the thoughts drift from my mind. The roar of a jet plan high above in the sky broke my reverie and I thought about the jets in the sky that day eight years ago today. Then the roar of the engine disappeared and I returned to living my life. We must all return to our lives. But we must never forsake the dead.
The best way to pay tribute to those who left us is to live as fully and as honorably as we can.
One day our practice will suddenly end. One day we will simply return to where it all began.
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Corbett
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