Making the Music Last

 

(c) Bob Lang

For the most of us, there is only the unattended Moment,

The moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.  These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest is 

Prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

-T.S. Eliot

The unattended moment.  The moment in and out of time.  Twenty-one years ago, on a crystal clear, simply gorgeous early September Tuesday morning, the world changed.  In a moment in and out of time. 

World Trade Center - The Final Sunset

September 10, 2001

If you were alive twenty-one years ago, the world in which you lived was far from an idyllic place.  We the people of these United States had already begun to trivialize those things that were important and to elevate trivial things to an unwarranted level of importance.  For a period of time, which proved to be all-too-short following September 11, 2001, we ceased to do so.  We focused not on blue/red, liberal/conservative, or Democrat/Republican.  We focused not on the things that make us different.  We focused instead on the things we had in common.  The things that we shared. 

The world to which we awakened on September 12, 2001 was markedly different than the world to which we said good night on September 10, 2001.  It was a world in which we had seen firsthand the sacrifices complete strangers were willing to make for one another.  A world in which our whole was greater than the sum of our parts.  

We, the living, owe a debt to the dead.  The debt we owe is to never forget.  To never forget their sacrifice.  To never forget how their sacrifice made us all better.  Their sacrifice was forever.  

That long, at the very least, should be spent repaying that debt.  

Never forget.  Never forgotten. 

-AK