Shining Examples in a Dark Time

"Look for the helpers.

You will always find people who are helping."

-Mr. Rogers

My young children's faces in a rearview mirror. That's one of the most vivid images I have from 25 years ago, when on an absolutely beautiful September day, the world suddenly felt like a very dark place. It's an image that endures alongside a whole lot of others from that day--ones that all of us of a certain age share: balls of fire, falling bodies, falling buildings--and it is every bit as vivid.

Those two and four-year-old faces were looking back at me expectantly, waiting for me to answer my daughter's question about what the people on the radio were talking about. Wherever I had been driving with them that day, I had been lost in the wall-to-wall coverage of the September 11th attacks. In hindsight, I should have had "Baby Beluga" playing on the car's CD player, not death and mayhem on the radio. But like everyone else that day, even those anchors and reporters on the news stations, I was just trying to make sense of what was happening. And suddenly, my children were asking me to explain it to them.

Every parent in the quarter-century since that week has found themselves having to explain to their children the events and significane of a day now very distant in our collective rearview mirror. I believe we owe it to them to, in age appropriate ways, help them understand what a terrible time that was. But the single most important thing we can do is help them understand how those same dark events shone a bright light on the very best of of people.

On that day a quarter-century ago, in the worst moment imaginable, ordinary people did extraordinary things for people they had never met. Firefighters climbed stairwells that everyone else was running down. Neighbors carried neighbors. Strangers became family for a day, and for many, for good.

There are powerful lessons to be learned from that traumatic moment in history, lessons that go hand in hand with what we strive to teach our kids on the Dojo mat.

None of those people woke up that morning and decided, for the first time, to be brave. Courage like that isn't manufactured in the moment — it's assembled, one deliberate choice at a time, long before anyone is watching. It's built the same way we build it here at the Dojo: through years of showing up, of doing the hard rep when nobody's counting, of choosing discipline on the ordinary Tuesday so that it's simply who you are on the day that isn't ordinary at all.

That's what I want my own kids — and every kid who walks through our doors — to take from September 11th. Not just the sadness of it, though that's real, and it's theirs to feel, too. I want them to understand that the instinct to run toward a stranger who needs help doesn't arrive out of nowhere. It's trained. It's a habit built from a thousand smaller moments: holding a door, standing up for a kid getting picked on, telling the truth when a lie would be easier, showing up to class on the day you'd rather stay home.

So this week, when you talk to your own kids about 9/11 — and I'd encourage every parent to have that conversation, in whatever way fits their child's age — don't stop at what happened. Tell them what happened next. Tell them about the ordinary people who turned out, in that moment, to be extraordinary, and let them in on the secret: that kind of character isn't something you're born with. It's something you train. That's the work we're doing together, class by class, so that whatever moment eventually asks something of our kids — big or small — they've already been building the answer.

See you on the mat.