No. 7 · September 11

Twenty five years ago…

I was a few days into my final year of Aerospace Engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa. I would have finished a year earlier, but I had taken a long, 16 month internship first.

That morning, I was getting ready to leave my apartment for class. The news was playing in the background.

Then the newscasters’ voices changed.

Something felt wrong.

I looked up.

And I watched, live, as an aeroplane flew into the World Trade Center.

I did not have the words for it then. I am not sure I do now.

If you are under thirty, it may be difficult to grasp how completely the world changed that day. You would have had to live in the world that came before it.

Airport security as we know it did not exist. TSA. CATSA. Entire agencies were created in the months that followed. Reinforced cockpit doors. Air marshals. The screening, the lines, the shoes and belts.

So much of what we now consider normal came after.

But the true weight of that day was carried by the people directly affected.

Nearly three thousand people did not come home.

Families were broken in an instant.

First responders ran toward a horror most of us cannot imagine, and many of them never came back.

It changed my life too, in a far smaller way.

When we finally graduated eight months later, no one was hiring.

The aerospace industry had fallen into a deep slumber. Companies that once lined up to recruit young engineers did not even show up to our final project presentations.

But amid all of it, there was also this.

When American airspace closed, hundreds of flights had nowhere to go. Many were sent north, to Canada.

To Gander. To Halifax. To small towns across Atlantic Canada.

And ordinary Canadians opened their doors.

They took in thousands of stranded strangers. Fed them. Housed them. Sat with them through the fear.

I don't think anyone cared where anyone was from.

We were simply neighbours showing up for neighbours.

There is something worth remembering in that, especially in times when nations find themselves divided by borders, politics and disagreements.

Long before any of those things, we are people.

And sometimes it takes the darkest moments to remind us of that.

September 11 was also a waypoint in my own life.

A waypoint without a planned course correction sends you down a different path.

We will never know the other lives we might have lived. The roads not taken. The what ifs.

Had the aerospace industry not collapsed just as I graduated, perhaps my own path would have been completely different.

I will never know.

But I have come to believe that, somehow, we end up more or less where we were meant to be.

Today, one day early, I remember those who never got the chance to find out where their own paths would have taken them.

WAYPOINTS · No. 7

A series of inflection points on a journey still being written.