Where Now?
by Clay Risen

Every day I take the same route to work. I walk to the subway, travel three stops, get off and walk five blocks to my office. It is always a quiet and pleasant trip. This week, of course, it has been a little more quiet, and a little less pleasant. People are less hurried, but they are also more on edge, distraught. Life is fundamentally out of place, like a shirt that's misbuttoned. It works, but it's wrong.

And yet I've noticed subtle changes in all the little things I've come to take for granted during my workday. More people giving to the homeless. Unhurried words of courtesy — "no, after you" — have replaced the rude silence of rush hour. Some of my coworkers who, before Tuesday, always worked late have been leaving promptly at five, going home to their families. Whereas before one might have received a nod passing someone in the hallway, suddenly it's "how are you?" or "take care of yourself."

In the wake of Tuesday's event, we find ourselves groping for some way to explain it to ourselves, to put it into a category. Yet as soon as we light on a comparison — Pearl Harbor, Vietnam — it proves inadequate. There are no words for what we have seen, and we find ourselves staring, in shock, at the enormity of it all, wordless in a new world. We run through emotion after emotion — fear, sorrow, anger, vindictiveness — and each falls short.

Perhaps, though, if anything good is to come of Sept. 11, this speechlessness is the beginning of a new and better time. Unable to fit the event into our old ways of thinking, we are being forced to create new ones. Faced with so much loss, we must arrive at new values for human life. Faced with so many lives cut short, we must re-evaluate our priorities, ask what really matters in our lives. It is not something we can plan for, or set policies to affect, but something that will just happen — something that only a tragedy like this can jumpstart. A new era of compassion, a time when love replaces greed, when empathy replaces hate, may be just around the corner.

And maybe, just maybe, all those little things I've seen on my way to work — tiny blossoms of human decency and kindness — are the first signs of that new beginning.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.