The Aerial Horizon

Do something three times, you have a tradition…do something 100 times, you have a habit…do something 10,000 times, you have mastery…but some experiences are so earthshaking that once forever changes your approach to your world and the people you love.

None of us are really all that good at openly expressing how we feel. I don’t mean how we feel about little things like the crest of a wave that blows spray in a momentary tantrum in the face of the wind. I don’t even mean how we feel about big things like the tides that predictably rise and fall with the orbit of the moon. We are not good at openly expressing how we feel about the intangible yet immense things like the gravity that holds the planets and their satellites in their enduring and interrelated orbits around the sun and compels our motion on the earth, the seas, and the skies…It surrounds and us and gives cause to everything we know. While we cannot touch it, we would immediately and forever be lost without it.

When we feel that way about people, our efforts to demonstrate our feelings have mixed results and while we know that our love of others is at our core, our personal sense of gravity, we fail to share that openly and often enough, at times, leading us to doubt that our loved ones comprehend the strength of that force in our relationships. We all have a fundamental need to know that we are loved and when that love is shared by two people or a family, whether related or chosen, it feels like the pull of gravity binding us together in the universe. We express these feelings with our words, facial expressions, touch, and basic acts of kindness as well as myriad other ways that we uniquely communicate our affections.

On the morning of September 11^th, 2001, I suspect that the most spoken words over the telephone lines were the simple and sometimes tearful words, “I love you.” For those of us who were close to the events and lived through that day, that single traumatic event expressed another sort of gravity…a force that draws us back to relive that day every year. We will never forget, and we will always say “I love you” when we walk out the door for another ordinary day.