September 11, 2026

The People Who Ran Toward It

What twenty-five years of remembering 9/11 is still teaching me about courage, duty, and who we become before the moment asks something of us.

A quarter century ago, thousands of people were running out of two burning buildings in Lower Manhattan. And some people were running in.

I’ve thought about that image for years. I don’t know what I would have done. That uncertainty is probably part of why it stays with me.

Most of us like to imagine we would rise to the occasion when something extraordinary happens. That we would be brave. That we would know what to do. That we would move toward the person who needs help instead of away from the danger. Maybe we would. Maybe we wouldn’t.

The people running toward those towers didn’t have the luxury of knowing how the story ended. They didn’t know the towers would fall. They didn’t know which floor would become impossible to reach. They didn’t know whether the stairwell ahead of them was safe. They just knew people were still inside. So they kept going.

Firefighters climbed while office workers descended. Police officers moved toward the chaos. Paramedics set up where the injured would come. Passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 confronted something unimaginable because doing nothing had become its own decision. So many people that morning moved toward something every instinct should have told them to avoid.

I find that difficult to comprehend. And maybe that’s because we tend to think about courage as something that appears when the moment arrives. I’m not sure that’s how it works. I wonder if the decision to run toward something is usually made much earlier.

In the years of training. In the promises we’ve made. In the responsibilities we’ve accepted. In the habits we’ve built. In the people we’ve decided matter more than our own comfort.

Maybe courage in the moment is often the result of a thousand smaller decisions made before the moment ever came. A firefighter doesn’t become a firefighter when the building catches fire. A parent doesn’t become a parent when the child gets sick. A friend doesn’t become a friend when the phone rings at two in the morning. The moment doesn’t create that person. It just reveals who was already there.

That idea has been bothering me lately. Most of us will never be asked to run into a burning skyscraper. But all of us will eventually have something we’d rather run from.

Back during COVID lockdowns, the nursing home where my mother was staying allowed me thirty minutes with her, for two straight days. Dementia had set in by then, and she couldn’t understand why none of her six children had come to visit in months, even after I explained it. I didn’t want to spend what little time we had dwelling on that, so I let it go and just loved her the best way I knew how. Holding her hand. Telling her about her kids and grandkids. Praying with her. Making her laugh. Playing our mother-son wedding song one more time.

Somewhere in that visit, I also had to do the harder thing. I had to tell her it was okay to let go. That her faith had carried her this far. That we would be alright. She died a week later, three days before her eighty-fourth birthday.

My mother spent her whole life telling me and my siblings that if you see someone who needs help, you just help them. Don’t plan it out. Don’t decide ahead of time what kind of help they need. Just help them. I don’t think I would have known how to sit with her those last two days if she hadn’t spent a lifetime teaching me what to do when someone needed you. The lesson had been built long before the moment required it.

I don’t think that story is unique. I think we all have moments like this, in one form or another. A hard conversation we know we need to have. A friend whose life has become complicated enough that helping them is no longer convenient. A parent who begins needing more from us than we expected to give. A child who is struggling in a way we don’t know how to fix. A marriage that requires something harder than the easy version of love. A responsibility nobody assigned us but that somehow ended up sitting in front of us anyway.

The situations are not remotely equivalent to what happened on September 11. But the direction still matters.

Toward or away. Stay or leave. Step in or let somebody else handle it. Show up or find a reason not to.

I think we usually know which direction is easier. What I’m less sure of is whether we’re becoming the kind of people who know which direction is ours.

That may be one of the things I admire most about the first responders and ordinary people whose stories we still tell from that day. They seemed to know. Not everything. Not whether it would work. Not whether they would be safe. Just what they were responsible for next.

We talk a lot about purpose now. Finding your purpose. Living your purpose. Building a career around purpose. I wonder if purpose is sometimes less grand than that. Maybe sometimes purpose is simply knowing what’s yours to move toward. The person, the responsibility, the hard thing, the place where you are needed. And then going.

There’s another part of September 11 I keep thinking about. The people running toward the towers weren’t doing it for recognition. Most of them probably didn’t think of what they were doing as extraordinary while they were doing it. There was a job to do. A person in front of them. A next floor. A next call. Someone else who needed help. It’s almost exactly what my mother used to say. Don’t plan it out. Don’t decide what kind of help they need. Just help.

There’s something almost old-fashioned about that kind of duty. Do the thing because it is yours to do. Help the person because they need help. Stay because leaving would mean someone else carries what you could have carried. Nobody has to be watching for it to count. Nobody ever has to find out. You already know.

Twenty-five years later, I still think about the people who ran toward it, especially the ordinary ones. The neighbors and coworkers, like my friend Mark’s dad, helping strangers down stairwells, holding doors, carrying someone who couldn’t keep going, making one more phone call for somebody they’d never met.

I still don’t know whether I would have been one of them. I don’t think any of us can know that about ourselves until the moment arrives. But maybe that isn’t really the question. Maybe the better question is what we’re doing now, before the moment comes.

What are we practicing? What responsibilities are we accepting? What kind of courage are we building? Who have we decided we will show up for? What are we teaching ourselves and our kids to move toward instead of away from?

Most of us will never face a morning like September 11. Thank God. But sooner or later, something will ask us to move toward it. A person who needs us. A responsibility we didn’t choose. A moment when showing up costs more than we expected.

Twenty-five years later, I still think about the people who ran toward it. And I wonder whether I’m becoming the kind of person who would.