Relative Something

Even though it felt seriously cold outside yesterday, with the wind making it seem like January again, the slow meltdown continues to progress without serious complications. The sand floor of the barn still stays wet where water has seeped in a couple of times when there was nowhere else for it to go. Beyond that, meltwater is all running calmly along our drainage swales as intended.

With the recent rainstorms that have moved through, the surface just beyond the barn overhang is once again as muddy as ever. When the last of the snow finally melts away I will miss the convenience of cleaning my boots in the lingering piles before returning to the house after feeding the horses.

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Looking in one direction along the driveway reveals plenty of newly visible ground.

Turning around to look up toward the house gives a much different impression.

On Tuesday night I watched the first of a 3-part PBS Frontline documentary series, “America and the Taliban,” and was impressed by the combination of perspectives provided from both sides. My viewing of this happened shortly after I had come upon a video interview with 9/11 survivor Pasquale Buzzelli where he described one of the ways he dealt with his survivor guilt.

With these powerful episodes resonating in my mind, one right after the other, I’m feeling an unexpected flashback to September 2001. I didn’t immediately know the attacks were happening at the time. In an office in the middle of a building, I placed a call to a person I knew about some mundane issue and was met with a strange response from her. It caught me off guard. She conveyed a sense of our issue being rather meaningless in the face of things.

In the face of what things? She just assumed I was aware of what was going on. This was when I learned planes had flown into the Twin Towers.

Pasquale Buzzelli described a point [me paraphrasing] in his psychological recovery when he put himself in the shoes of a friend/coworker who died when the tower collapsed. Imagining what the dead man would think about Pasquale surviving –or if Pasquale had died and was looking at his friend who survived– he surmised that the hope and desires of the deceased spirit would be that the survivor would get on with life and live it to the fullest possible extent. Doing so becomes a way to honor those who didn’t survive.

It helped Pasquale to move beyond the funk in which he had been floundering.

The Frontline documentary touches on the issue of Taliban bombings killing innocent Afghan citizens –women and children. It still seems unjustifiable in every way, but when the Taliban official being interviewed framed it from his view of the situation being a war to rid his country of invaders, I felt a moment of being able to perceive his perspective.

Two things on my mind from this throwback to the terror attacks:

• In 2001, terrorists worked on their plan for months and within our borders while I was unaware. Are there other long-game attacks in the works in 2023 that our intelligence is missing while threats from China, Russia, and an indicted past US President dominate the news?
• We should ALL be honoring those who don’t survive or those who are our ancestors by striving to become the best we can be.

We are no better than anyone else in the world, but we can become the best of ourselves if we sincerely put our minds to it.

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