It’s weird, when we were walking around near Ground Zero last month and I spotted people going on with their normal routine in a gym I had exactly the same thoughts that Ryan did. We never discussed them then or afterward and I only found out when he posted this picture.
I almost mentioned it while we were there, but for some reason it seemed…irrelevant. But I think maybe I just knew there was no need, because we were both on the same page. Words weren’t needed. We were thinking and feeling the same thing at the same moment and that was enough right then.
I fully admit that this photograph is not very good. But I think in a very real sense, taken in full context, it is extremely wonderful.
This is about a block from the site where the world trade center towers fell, pretty much exactly (within an hour) ten years before this picture was taken.
Very close was the boundary that marked the closest point the public could get to the site at that time, in fact the sidewalk directly underneath the window pictured was closed off as the anniversary ceremony for select VIP guests was occurring a short distance away.
Yet, despite all of that, up there in that window, in a gym, a woman was texting as she ran on a treadmill. If she’d been there ten years earlier and looked out that same window she’d have seen devastation and death or perhaps nothing more than a cloud of smoke and debris.
But she is running instead, she is doing the very thing those people who attacked America and our way of life ten years ago so badly wanted to destroy, she is simply living her life. She’s getting her morning exercise in before going about her day, she’s doing what people do.
When I look at this picture, knowing the full story behind it, I’m easily able to look past my horrible composition, lack of exciting colors, slight underdevelopment, glare on the window, and some focus issues to see what it really is: victory.
