Live Big® Digest – 9/11 edition

As the 10-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks draws near, we find our world as messy as ever. Ongoing strife in Afghanistan, crushing reprisals in Syria, regime change in Egypt and Libya, sovereign debt crises in Europe, and a faltering economic recovery in the U.S., are all there to remind us of how little we control. For most of us, this will be a weekend of rememberance and a weekend to draw our loved ones closer, cherishing that which most matters whether the times are good or bad.

Looking back on the now decade-old horror that unfolded amid crumbling twin towers, a smoking Pentagon, and the heroic downing of an airliner in a Pennsylvania field, we are reminded of the similar state of our world. Stock market crash and recession were the backdrop, and war in the Mid-East would soon follow. And in remembering, we also find ourselves thinking of Dickens’ famous opening line from A Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

We felt the need to quote Dickens’ wise and ironic 1859 observation, not to make light of the troubles that surround us today nor those we lived through a decade ago, but as reminder that the world is always and ever filled with the best of things and the worst. We cannot choose a different kind of world, we can only choose how we’re going to live in it.

And with that thought, we find ourselves revisiting the list that we built with your help: What does it mean to Live Big in these trying times?

As always, if your weekend reveries give rise to any new additions, please share them with us and we’ll share them with the world.

Here’s wishing you and yours a peaceful weekend.

The Yeske Buie Team