Dear reader,
On repeat this morning is Ezra Collective’s new album Here Because of Hope. Please shimmy those shoulders to it as you make coffee/brekkie/lunch/dinner.
Today marks 25 years since 9/11. My thoughts and prayers are with those who lost their loved ones, the heroes, and for a city that is recovering to this day. The 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan is quite a meditative, special place.
My mom used to tell me about where we were when it happened. She had the old TV on in Texas, doing morning laundry as a month-old me required her attention.
Then a boom, and a few subsequent more, went off through the TV.
I have not lived in a world where the remnants of 9/11 — both literal and figurative — are not everywhere we turn. I don’t know what boarding a plane looked like before September 11th, 2001. I don’t know what the feeling of trust in each other felt like before an event that shook our belief in the good and left us untethered from one another while also having to cling to each other for survival.
There are worlds I simply arrived too late for. A pre-9/11 sense of ease and trust. And medicine before it became a business.
In my exploration of healing and prevention over treatment, I am currently reading Next Medicine by Dr. Walter Bortz II — a physician who dedicated his life to the science of aging, longevity, and reclaiming medicine’s nobility of service to humanity. His granddad told him: “make yourself necessary.” He seems to have done that tenfold. I have always been fascinated by people who intentionally choose to spend their time on Earth way differently than the majority of people. Bortz did. One of the greatest benefits of serving others as well as being served is PERSPECTIVE — the chance to see people from a vantage point you otherwise wouldn’t.
Bortz was privileged to witness the Golden Age of medicine that saved humanity from polio and smallpox. He quotes Sir William Osler: “Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.” Published in 2011, his book feels exponentially relevant today. He writes that the commentary on medicine’s decline has mostly been about baby steps — and you can’t baby step over a chasm. He describes himself as an optimist and idealist who delights in wandering far outside his own discipline.
Here is the perspective shift I keep coming back to: what if we weren’t born too late for the good times? What if we were born exactly on time — to be the renaissance? To be the leap across the chasm? To reclaim the trust, the nobility, the belief in the good?
Here Because of Hope isn’t just an album title. It might be the whole assignment, and Ezra Collective understood it.
Holding space for grief today. And holding space for the art of probability in the science of uncertainty — and the opportunities to rise from the ashes.
With much love & to going beyond the surface,
Anjali