- Unknown

Where were you on that day?

I was in Atlanta, Georgia, in graduate school, working at a large church in downtown Atlanta. We were gathering for a weekly staff planning meeting when one of the staff members came in and told us he'd just heard that one of the Twin Towers had been hit by a passenger plane.

We all just sort of sat there stunned, looking at each other, then unanimously agreed without really saying anything, that we needed to end this meeting and go find out more about what was happening.

I called my husband - who is much more up on current events that me - to ask what happened. By the time I called, the 3rd plane had just hit the Pentagon.

I immediately contacted a couple of friends who worked on Capital Hill to see if they were okay. They were in the process of evacuating the building. Class had been cancelled at school, and anything that needed to be done at work seemed trivial in the light of what was happening...

So I drove home - still in a daze.

If you've ever driven in Atlanta traffic - or any big city traffic for that matter - you know it's sometimes not a very "nice" or peaceful thing. But this day, i remember feeling a sense of courtesy, a sense of neighborliness, a sense of surreal-ness.

That evening I got together with a small group of friends to sort of "debrief" and better understand what had happened.

There was a lot of anger in that gathering. There was also a lot of calm. Calm in the sense that, okay, this tragedy has happened. What can we do now?

Several of us felt that focusing on the event, reliving its terror (i.e. watching the non-stop reruns of it on TV) and joining the mass hysteria was not the best thing to do. It would not erase the fact that the events had happened, nor would it help to promote it not happening again. And it would not do us any good physically either!

Instead, focusing on peace and using the event as a "wake up call" would do more in the long run.

Whatever you focus on grows.

That is the universal Law of Attraction. It's stated in the Bible as "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."

If you want change - whether it's personal, business-related, the environment, or the world - you will not change it by focusing on what is. That only gives you more of what is.

Change occurs when you focus on the end result - the goal - and then take inspired action toward it. In the case of 911, that means doing your part to promote peace in all aspects of your life - in your home, in your workplace, in your car stuck in traffic, and most importantly, in your heart. That is what's meant by BEing the change you want to see.

How has it affected your life?

In the days following 911, leaders of our country encouraged us to keep going and doing our normal life. This was good in the sense that, when something bad happens, it does no one any good for us to, as I say, "roll over and die." Life does go on and we all have people in our lives that depend on us. Living in fear is counter-productive.

However, going on as if nothing happened is unhealthy and spiritually damaging.

When these "life shocks" happen, the thing to do is retreat a bit and regroup. Look inside your heart and your soul and listen for what it has to say. Open up to the God-voice inside and ask:

For me, 911 was a big neon sign saying: BE AWARE.

I realized that I needed to be more aware of what was happening in the world, and also that I needed to see people as individual human beings with their own attitudes, hopes, dreams, and struggles.

This was way before I even knew the coaching field existed. Who knows, this may have been one of those "course-correction" events that guided me to where I am today? We are all connected.

What can you do now?

I have referred to 911 as a "wake up call." Let me explain...

In my observations, I believe that, as an American people, we have become complacent and too caught up in the luxuries of life. The notion of taking personal responsibility for our actions and our lives was left behind long ago. We have become an "it's all about me, who cares about you" society. We're like first graders, cutting in line, fighting for the coveted "first in line" position.

In addition, our lives are so busy doing this, doing that, running here and there, we don't have time to think. And even if we did, there's a TV or radio playing somewhere to distract us from our own thoughts. We're so inundated that we buy into what the media tells us, what advertising tells us, and what the government tells us.

There's an old adage my parents used to say:

"Only believe half of what you read and none of what you see."

What CAN you do now?

First of all, don't take everything you hear or read as gospel truth. Do some investigating. Take advantage of the world-wide-web. It's loaded with information - mainstream (what you hear in the media) and non-mainstream (what you don't hear about in the media).

I did a google search on "911" and came up with some fascinating, thought-provoking sites with evidence that all is not what it seemed on that fateful day. I encourage you to do your own search. In the meantime, here are a few of the links that caught my interest: