Twenty-five
years ago, nearly 3,000 people went to work, boarded airplanes, poured coffee,
kissed somebody goodbye, complained about traffic and worried about things that
would have seemed unimportant a few hours later.
Some never came home.
Marcus Aurelius wrote something centuries
ago that has been banging around in my head this morning:
“Reject the sense of injury and the
injury itself disappears.”
I don't know if I completely agree with the
old Roman emperor.
Some injuries don't disappear. Some names
stay with you. Some voices stay in your head. Some mornings remain frozen in
time no matter how many years the calendar piles on top of them.
…But maybe he wasn't telling us
to forget.
Maybe he was telling us not to
surrender. Remember the injury, remember the person, remember what
happened, but don't let the people who inflicted it decide what becomes of you
afterward.
Twenty-five years later, we are still
here.
We went back to work, we raised a
family, we watched ballgames, we buried our parents.
We got a chance to fall in love. We
made friends along the way, and we lost friends as well. We laughed again and
we cried again…
We got the chance to continue to
live, and that is the part Marcus Aurelius got right. The wound can
remain without becoming the whole story, just don’t surrender to it.
