Eight years...
Eight years ago at this moment I was talking with Dave Winer. We could not believe what we were seeing on CNN.
The World Trade Center coming down was a metaphor for my own life coming down. Over the next few months I got in a car wreck that totalled my car and left me thinking "that could have been it." That led to ending my marriage. Starting a new relationship and getting engaged to Maryam. We shipped a new product at work (Radio UserLand, which took a lot of long hours). I was running the books at UserLand and knew we were running out of money quickly and that soon I'd be jobless. In March, six months after 9/11, I laid myself off. Oh, and my grandma died there and I'm sure some other things went wrong too. It seemed my entire world was crashing down.
But those six months were transformative.
First, I said to myself "well, if life is going to whack me, I'm going to have fun!"
Second, I made every day better than yesterday.
It made life very simple and when I've failed I go back again to these two thoughts. Make the world better (that's how you make tomorrow better than today) and remember that someday we all end up in a box anyway so might as well take some risks and have some fun now cause this story doesn't end well.
But today I'm looking back at the last eight years and all that's gone on. The interesting people I've interviewed (more than 1,500). The book I wrote with Shel Israel. All the blog posts. The time spent on Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook. The technology I've seen change (I'm working on a video of how cars are changing due to technology right now).
My new son, who now is two years old, and a new one on the way. I look with pride at Patrick, who now is 15. He was six back then and I wanted him to watch all the events unfolding on CNN so he would know why he had to wait in long lines at the airport and would know why his life had other problems that I never faced earlier in my life. He still is scared of flying on planes. I hope he gets over that.
Maryam and I have had an extraordinary amount of fun and we've been around the world lots of times (Milan, now two, has been to Europe four times).
The past eight years have been extraordinary in my life. But it all started with that morning eight years ago when life reminded me that we're not in control and that all we have is now.
