Changing Times

Arggh! Just produced a carefully crafted write-up for this image, linking the man changing the train times with how life changes suddenly - as it did for so many ten years ago today.

Then "an error occurred", proving my point that we lose things in an instant.

I haven't the time to write it all again now, maybe I'll come back and do it later.

Added later.

I was listening to the radio earlier on today; and then put on the tv as I was bustling around getting ready to disappear off on a work trip. Almost inevitably, much of what I was hearing and seeing was from the States, where various carefully organised and well-thought through events were taking place to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

I remembered my own experiences of that day, the email from my Canadian boss in Toronto that gave us in our office the first hint that something was going on in New York, being the only one able to log on to the BBC website before it started to struggle under the sheer number of hits, running down the corridor with most of the other people in the building to watch the satellite tv in the AV technician's office and seeing the second tower collapse in real time. Mind-blowing.

But almost as vivid is my memory of a month later. I was in North Carolina for a conference and on the last night, 11th October, there was a low key but heartfelt tribute. A few people spoke, then one of the delegates (whose name, unfortunately, I have forgotten) read a poem that she had written a month earlier. She had been out for a walk before any drama had started to unfold and had started the poem then, with the line "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"

As the day had gone on so she had written more. The second part of the poem started differently:

It's a beautiful day, isn't it? Wasn't it?

The shift in tense says it all for me. It represents one of those shocking moments when the world, or at least part of it, is irrevocably changed in a split second.

It happens, doesn't it? To all of us in different ways. Something happens - a decision is made, a car takes a corner too fast, a piece of masonry falls, a bus is missed - and life is never the same. We may wish as hard as we like to roll back time but it's not going to work; and we simply cannot pretend the event didn't take place and carry on the same. Times change.

So for me, amidst the sadness of marking events across the ocean today, this provides a real spur to value what is truly valuable, to enjoy what is enjoyable, and to set things right quickly when they go awry.