Do What You Do Well
I wrote and posted this a bit ahead of schedule, in response to recent events. I’m also looking back more than two decades.
Terrorist pilots attacked the Twin Towers on Tuesday morning, 9/11/2001. My assistant and I arrived at my Soho office shortly after the planes had hit their targets, before the towers fell. Wireless telephone transmitters were still operational, so we made phone contact and confirmed that our other colleagues would stay home.
Still reeling from the news, we had to evacuate. My assistant and I joined the people trudging uptown. Many had been walking for two miles or more already, because walking was the only means of ground transport up from the financial district. The subways were not running and streets were closed to traffic. You could tell which people had come from the place soon to be called Ground Zero – their clothing, faces, hair, briefcases, and bags were covered in a whitish ash. We all headed North, not speaking, away from the carnage and rubble. Kind civilians on streetcorners near the Public Theater offered bottled water to the ash people as they passed by.
Going back to normal
A mere three days later, on Friday, the city reopened the area where my business had its office. We could all go back to work.
Back to work
Image by beasternchen from Pixabay
We were ‘back to normal’ – except how was that possible? The world was horrified, the nation was in shock, and the city was devastated. We all knew people who’d been in one of the towers that day – and others who, by strange happenstance, intended to be, but weren’t. I remember many fraught conversations with friends and strangers, untangling rumors, hesitantly accepting the new reality, consoling one another.
Those of us living or working in the lower part of the city became accustomed to seeing handmade signs on lampposts and buildings, asking for help locating a missing person. Taped to the exterior walls of the small hospital near my apartment were children’s crayon drawings. One I’ll always remember showed blue sky, puffy clouds, a tall building cut in two by an airplane, and a body on the ground, also cut in two.
People helping people
What were my friends doing to help in the crisis? One enlisted as a prep cook, chopping vegetables at night for chef Paul Bouloud to feed the emergency workers at Ground Zero. Another joined the bucket brigade, hauling unspeakable debris away from the site, one pail at a time, while rescue teams searched. Another offered comfort to families and loved ones of people who had died in the attack. Another wrote a haunting song based on one of those missing person posters.
At Union Square Park one evening soon afterward, many people gathered for a silent vigil. We didn’t have social media, and I don’t know how the word spread, but when a friend and I showed up the place was full of humanity. It felt almost magical. The silence was broken only by the young man who sat down with a music stand and his instrument and played Bach cello suites. Everyone’s face was soft. We had all been touched by the horror and in those early days the crisis was uniting us in kindness and sorrow.
Putting out the word
At the time, I edited a client’s web-based arts magazine. I felt the need to say things, to publish useful information and supportive ideas. It couldn’t measure up to the hard work my friends were doing but I needed to do something. So I began posting things each day. Bits of news. Images of those children’s drawings. Quotations from people I admired, past and present. I heard from the firefighter-artist who had written for us before. He checked in with an update for the publication. He’d been at the towers that day and lost colleagues in the disaster. When I ran into him outside the firehouse on Lafayette Street on my walk to work a few days later, we embraced wordlessly. That’s what the atmosphere was like in lower Manhattan then.
Why am I telling you this? Because I came out of that experience 23 years ago with a little motto: “Do what you do well.” Maybe it will be helpful now.
No, this is not the same situation. For one thing, we have all been warned this time. The attacks we can foresee will not come from weaponized aircraft. The majority of the intended victims may not be businesspeople in tall buildings. But maybe we can derive something useful from the past when the new threats begin playing out.
Use the good tools
When things fall apart, it makes sense to reach for well-worn tools that fit your hand, so to speak. For me back then, those tools were my camera, word processing software, and the online distribution network my client’s publication provided. For others, it was their knife skills, strong back, spiritual training, and songwriting talent. They each went with what they knew they could offer. My prep-cook friend, while extremely fit, is a petite person who could not have assisted efficiently on the bucket brigade. Meanwhile the bucket brigade person was excellent at heavy lifting but not at cutting up carrots. And so on.
What tools will each of us be using in the days to come? Who will you embrace?
Remember to rest and recover
There’s a lot we don’t know yet. We may not feel equipped emotionally to make concrete plans at this point. Ideas will start bubbling, though, if they haven’t already. We can expect some stops and starts along the way. Putting yourself out there takes effort and energy. So it’s always important to allow for the recovery and rest time we need. Those needs can often change from one moment to the next, too, so it will make sense to be alert and honor them as they shift.
We’re all in it together
Another key is community. No matter how isolated you normally prefer to be, it’s likely that in the stressful times to come a sense of belonging will matter to all of us. We don’t have to do face-to-face meetings every day. But in various ways, over time, almost all of us will benefit from strong relationships that sustain us and reinforce and inform our values and beliefs.
Ask questions
How can we use our talents and abilities to be kind now? Who will help support us as we help support others? Where will we aim our voices? For what cause? How can we focus our creativity to problem solving for a person or population that is already under more threat from the geopolitical shifts we will be undergoing? How can we help? How can we serve?
Commit
When we choose a thing to do, we’ll probably want to give it everything we’ve got. If the first choice doesn’t feel right, we’ll try another thing. We’ll learn from other people about new opportunities and initiatives. This isn’t the time for half measures. We can’t close off our hearts, as tender as they may be feeling. Our future is in our shared humanity. We can offer our time and treasure. Do good work. Create. Only connect. We can do what we do, well.
•
When you subscribe to the ACC Today newsletter, you’ll get each new blog post like this one, as it’s published, including occasional guest posts from wonderful writers and coaches. Here’s where to sign up.
Thanks for reading
~ Anne