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September 11, 2013
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I was at the World Trade Center when the towers fell. I worked close by and people came up to me, random people, saying, "People are jumping off the Towers." When you hear that, you don’t believe it. You don’t think, "This is not a good place to be." You want to see.
The towers were burning, yet so few people were walking away. I am always the first one out of a building when there’s a fire alarm. And I am the first to identify the exit rows on a plane. But not that day. That day I stood with everyone else, head tilted up toward the sky.
I was so close to the building. Right there, at the base. When it fell I couldn’t see that it was falling. I thought it was an earthquake. I had just moved from California so I ducked and covered. People trampled me and by the time I stood up to run, the world was dark. The air was thick. There was no sound.
I told myself I should have shut my mouth sooner and then I’d have a little more oxygen. I told myself I was going to die from asphyxiation. I could feel it. For a tiny moment I remembered it’s a very painful way to die. But then a weird calmness came and I thought only of my family and how much I loved them and how disappointed I was to not see how their lives would turn out.
I couldn’t see through the falling debris so I calmly put my hands out in front of myself looking for a way out. I told myself to just keep looking until I died.
I found a broken window and pulled myself inside a bank. There was air. There were men in filthy suits fighting over access to drinking water. From a toilet. I drank too.
I was disoriented not just that day, but that month. I left a hospital without telling anyone. I carried a wastebasket to protect myself from a bomb. I had both my eyes patched and didn’t shower for weeks.
Finally, someone convinced me to go to a World Trade Center support group. I was grouped with people who escaped their offices and were splattered by body parts from people jumping from the building.
A big theme of the group was "Work is so stupid. How could I ever go back?" People in my group left their desks that day while co-workers stayed to "just finish this one thing" and died.
We met for months in that group, and slowly we watched people, one by one, find work. New work. Or they went back to their job in another building. Some people moved far away for a job. It was almost always a job that made someone feel strong enough to leave the group.
This made sense because, in a lot of ways, 9/11 is about work. If you were at the World Trade Center, you were working. And it’s likely that you needed to go back to work.
What I learned from this experience is that it’s not just the money we work for. We needed to go back to work because while work does not give our life meaning, it makes our days feel fulfilling.
When you are about to die, you will think about your family. The people you love. You won’t think about work. But what will you do while you live? You can’t think about family every second. You need something else.
Work is that something else that makes us excited, engaged, and fulfilled. It can be marketing, or management, or parenting. It can be anything. But the work we do is the way we say that life is fragile and I am lucky, and I’m going to do something I like today.
Photo: Ed Schipul/Flickr
Featured on:Big Ideas & Innovation
Posted by:Penelope Trunk
