Beauty's in the eye of the beholder.
The concept of success lays nestled there too. We work our years, working, thinking, learning, and dreaming. It's not always tangible or desirable or even real, but it's invaluable and transformative and seductive all at once to have that success.
Success is work.
Success is patience.
Success is dedication.
Success is something we are proud of and teach our children to value.
9/11 left its mark upon our country in the span of a moment. With both collisions, the success, happiness, lives, and security of a vast network of people crumbled away and fell into the street with the rumble from the Twin Towers. Work, pride, and success all fell that day.
And as I stood staring at the 9/11 Memorial in NYC it seemed terribly unfair for it all to break so easily and fall apart as we all fear that our success one day shall.
The 9/11 Memorial is an impressed fingerprint scarring the concrete of New York City. It feels like it should be completely silenced, as if in salute to the events that transpired there and America's iconic stance on terrorism as we know it today. This silence does not exist--or at least, not yet. The scene throbs with booms, crashes, and beeps from construction and from my perch on a balcony overlooking the area, cranes and digging equipment abound and make their own mark in the traumatic traffic situation the city's famous for. The machines seem out of place next to the serene Ground Zero falling waters.
But what seemed most foreign was the thought that maybe this was someone else's idea of success.
It is obvious that anything on the scale of 9/11 requires planning, logistics, and faith.
Is this not comparable to work, patience, and dedication?
It is a morbid thought but it is also a reality; different people have different ideas of success that oftentimes do not coexist easily. Perhaps the Disney-esque response to this uncomfortable realization would be to say that given time, any ideas can exist together and everyone can be happy--but I'm not so sure Disney would have it right in this case.
It's become a global responsibility for people to learn how to define their idea of success and outline a plan for achieving it. We detail these concepts in applications, diary entries, via text, or even during drives and flights and conversations. We then attempt to pursue this success. It is, if anything, natural. But as we can see in 9/11, all these ideals and ideas can create conflict, friction, hatred, and hurt.
From this comes another responsibility: communication. If we take the time and the effort to communicate--both with one another and with ourselves--we would better understand other peoples' motivations and definitions of success. This is not to say that terrorism is acceptable nor is it to say that terrorism is preventable; this, rather, is completely true: the majority of the time, we don't understand another's reasons for doing things.
As a realistic goal, it may be that simply communicating and showing others the respect implied by communication could help solve many difficulties we as a global community face today. On a mini scale, it's difficult, for example, to try to guess why my dog's barking (did he see a squirrel? Or was it a rabbit? Is there a robber? Or did he attack the other dog?..), much less to understand what some other person separated by a hemisphere, a religion, a language, and a huge mess of prejudice and propaganda is trying to accomplish.
Unfortunately, I can't answer what people were thinking about 9/11 and I probably can't even conceptualize at the "why". But I do know that communication is powerful. And a lack of communication is dangerous.
And how does that saying go? Something like "better safe than sorry"....
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