Stop in Your Tracks

Sometimes we need to stop in our tracks. It's challenging to create an internal mechanism to do this. Most times this happens for me it's due to an external factor; this week that was certainly the case.

Life moves pretty fast...

This week was extraordinarily hot in the city, like shvitzy and soupy and gross hot.

But being part of a community means getting to know the diverse blend of people of all backgrounds and experiences. Their stories, challenges, what makes them tick. And the best way to truly get to this point takes a lot more than a zoom call, it just does. It's really on us all to get together with one another more meaningfully and frequently. Walking around the city, so focused on the next meeting, the next call, the next message, the next demo day, the next rooftop meetup... it's nice to get back to a laid back event, with some familiar and totally brand new faces... and then just watch a summer sunset. Which is a great way to stop yourself, look around.

But then, walking from Andrew Yeung's event to Ephraim Yarmak's accelerator demo day I absolutely stopped in my tracks; the lights from the World Trade Center memorial.

It's easy to let the days just go by without imbuing them with meaning and impact. We have our routines, our responsibilities. The days turn to years turn into decades and if you don't look around and stop in your tracks once in a while, we can miss a lot. Life moves so fast. 9/11 was over half my lifetime ago. People I met this week were born maybe just after it happened, or too late to have any memory at all of that terrible day. But as we approach this 22nd anniversary, let's stop in our tracks and remember.

It's difficult to talk about grief, we are not grief literate - it's not something we exactly plan for, even when we know something is coming. That's why this Daniel Crosby, Ph.D. podcast with Kathi Balasek, MA is so powerful and important:

I had a whole other idea for how I wanted to talk about the passage of time. It involved Beyonce and Hey Ya...maybe I'll put something more solid together but Beyonce just celebrated her birthday, and of course, it looked awesome -

And, just think about the internet for a minute and what you can do with it and what kind of information you have access to and the different people you can follow and learn from, like Jenny Q Ta - just a miracle.

Back to Hey Ya - great song clearly - it came out in 2003 - Beyonce just turned 42 (according to google, I'm happy to be fact checked) so do the math. And think about cultural icons and touchstones that have come and gone. In business, TV, politics...the early 2000s feel so long ago. And in some ways it was. But last week I was at the Nashville Public Library where there are pictures of civil rights sit-in protesters from the 1960s that are still alive. Things happened long ago, and yet it's not that long ago in the biggest picture of them all.

We don't know what tomorrow will bring. In the early post 9/11 days this felt much more intense and visceral. Now it feels a little more like something that happened a long time ago. But so many of us were here and are still here. And so many never came home that day; and it was just a regular, beautiful, horrible September day. Maybe that needs to be thought about more often while we go about our busy lives. I hope over time getting annoyed at airport security regulations that don't seem to match the reality of the world anymore are not the only thing people think about when they think about 9/11.

If we are thinking about it at all.