In Memory Of...

My Blog--and the Revolution I hope it helps catalyze--is in memory of those whose lives were taken 7 years ago today. I owe each of them a debt of gratitude for how they've helped me on my journey of this Walking Revolution--one toward Seeing Things Whole.


Although I'd traveled internationally some by 9-11-1 and had some international friendships and business relationships and was living near Dallas. one of the largest cities in America, my world was still a very small and narrow place. I remember sitting at my computer desk that morning, running my rapidly expanding business over the internet from the confines of my comfortable home and actually feeling a twinge of irritation that everything suddenly shut down because of some apparent airplane accident. I wasn't a big news watcher and I'm sorry to say it took me a few urgings by email before I even stopped what I was doing long enough to take the time to watch what was happening to people I didn't even know a thousand miles away.


But a few short hours later what had happened wasn't a thousand miles away anymore. It was the pastoral staff of our church who were called in to comfort the Dallas-based flight crew that often flew with the pilot and copilot of the plane that hit the Pentagon; they were raw with pain and grief and struggling with survivors' guilt. It was the sister of one of the few New Yorkers I knew who had been in the World Trade Center that morning and was missing. It was the international club of coaching colleagues I was managing from which I suddenly had people frantically calling me from Australia and England and Canada trying to see if I--their sole personal connection to the U.S.--had some additional news and insight for them they weren't getting from the media. And in the days and months to come it was my rapidly expanding business that just as rapidly went into a tailspin setting in motion other events in my life that upended my comfortable little world.

Up until that day I'd lived a fairly cocooned existence in which the events I watched (or more often avoided watching) on the news didn't have to have anything to do with my personal life--and therefore, with the daily choices I made. Not so from that point forward. While I didn't realize it strongly until in hindsight, that day marked a turning point in my life toward beginning to see more fully how the parts impact the whole and how every choice any of us makes matters to all the rest of us.

My favorite magazine ad about the environment has a picture of the world with the continents drawn out in words. The words that outline the face of the globe are one sentence repeated over and over again: "It's not my problem. It's not my problem. It's not my problem." The world is drawn out by the voices of those saying, "It's not my problem."

And then down below the picture is one simple word: "Yet." The Whole is not my problem...yet.

9-11-1 became my "yet" day. From that point forward I recognized how dependent we all are on the choices and actions of one another and that no matter how much we may wish to withdraw from the global issues that aren't in our own backyards "yet," we do not have that luxury.

We haven't answered all the questions yet that 9-11 raised; I'm not even sure we've asked ourselves the most important ones loudly and long enough yet. But for a few brief shining moments many of us tasted what it was like to suddenly see things whole and care about the whole. And that's part of what I walk now everywhere I go in memory of.

So this Blog is dedicated to the memory of all the casualties connected to that sad day. I hope that in my walking and my writing I can preserve some part of the legacy they themselves might have asked for if given the chance. Maybe if their voices were here among us today they would say, "Please. Learn to say 'It's my problem' now. Learn to say 'the whole is my problem' now. Don't wait for the 'yet' moment when it camps out at your doorstep and disrupts your business and shatters your dreams and claims the lives of those you love. Listen now. See it now. Make it your problem now."

Walking is just one choice we can make to begin to do something about the problems. I know I only represent one car that isn't adding to its role in the ecology and the economy and the political scene. But it's a start. And it's a way to remember all of them and what it cost them for us not to have made the Whole our problem sooner.