A Morning That Changed My Life
I saw 9/11 with my own eyes from an upper floor of a 45‑story office building at 1301 Avenue of the Americas. I had arrived at work minutes earlier, walking from my apartment near the United Nations, unaware that the day would mark a dividing line in my life.
A colleague came to my office and said something was happening downtown, and that other workers were gathering in one of the large conference rooms to try to understand what was going on. He and I joined them, and from the floor we were on, we had an unobstructed view from the glass wall looking south toward the Twin Towers.
Smoke rose from the North Tower. Then the second impact. Then the unimaginable collapse of both.
The Awareness That Never Left
The company I worked for lost 358 employees and contractors that morning. I could easily have been among them; our teams regularly met in the towers.
That awareness — that thin line between being here and not — changed my life’s direction when I was well into my Second Act of Life.
It made me reconsider what mattered, what was worth pursuing, and how I wanted to spend the years ahead. It shaped the work I chose, the communities I served, the gardens I planted, the bees I kept, and the life my husband and I built together.
The realization that life is short never left me, even as the years moved forward.
When Act Two Quietly Became Act Three
I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that those years were slipping by. Life was full — work, home, projects, travel, curiosity, growth. But as that Second Act continued to unfold, the awareness I carried from 9/11 lived quietly in the background.
Eventually, Act Two gave way to Act Three. There were no curtains opening or closing, no moment when I declared a new beginning. It just snuck in without announcing itself and without a big fuss. But it ultimately revealed itself in a big way twenty years after 9/11 when my husband lay unconscious in a hospital room, nearing the end of his life.
A Quiet Turning Point in a Hospital Room
A chaplain entered the room, introducing himself as Buddhist‑Presbyterian — a combination I didn’t know existed. We spoke for only a few minutes, but he offered a quote attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
That single sentence became the quiet turning point of my Third Act of Life.
If 9/11 taught me that life is short, the chaplain planted in me the idea that life is not at all what we thought it was. It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about, writing about, and meditating on ever since.
Two Moments That Changed How I Understand Life
These two moments — one public and catastrophic, one private and tender — didn’t just change my life; they changed how I understand life. They reframed grief, purpose, identity, and the question of what a Third Act of Life can be.
In the process, they helped to propel the web magazine Clarifying Reality into existence, and they serve as the starting point for Field Notes from the Third Act of Life, which begins here.
Field Notes: A Doorway to Understanding the Third Act of Life
But Field Notes is not just a memoir. It’s a collection of stories — mine and others’ — about the turning points that shape us, the shifts in our beliefs and spiritual convictions over time, and the quiet wisdom that helps us navigate the frontier of the Third Act of Life.
My story is simply the doorway. Beyond it are the stories of people whose lives have been bent, broken, expanded, or awakened in ways that illuminate what it means to live with intention in the time we have.
I’m now fully aware that I’m living in my Third Act of Life, and Field Notes is where I’ll explore what that means — for me, and for others.
