Defining Moments

Between Trapezes : Flying Into a New Life with the Greatest of Ease
by Gail Blanke

IT WAS SEPTEMBER 14, 2003, and my husband, Jim—the real cook in our family—had just whipped up one of his marvelous pasta dishes. Meanwhile, in the dining room, I had just picked up a glass of chilled pinot grigio in one hand and was about to light a candle with the other when suddenly a staccato series of explosions rocked our apartment building. You could not only hear them, you could feel them, shaking the very foundations of our apartment building on Manhattan's Upper East Side—or so it seemed.

"Jim! Jim!" I shouted, as our golden retriever, Molly, began jumping all over me in a panic. Still jittery two years after September 11, and convinced that we were once again under attack, I instinctively ran away from the window and into the kitchen, where Molly, Jim, and I lay flat on the kitchen floor and waited for the next explosion to blow. The first thing I could think to do was to reach for my cell phone to call our older daughter, Kate, who was somewhere in downtown Manhattan on her way to a college reunion. Abigail, our younger daughter, was safely away at college, so I didn't feel the need to call her—at least not right at that moment. After leaving a message on Kate's cell phone asking her to call us back immediately, we listened intently for the sound of the shocks.

As we lay there like soldiers ducking for cover, I could have sworn that those muffled explosions sounded more like gunfire than bombs. This oddly comforting thought eventually compelled me to stand up to size up the situation. I headed—tentatively, gingerly, cautiously—into the dining room, accompanied by Jim and Molly. All three of us stood at the window for a few seconds, looking out onto our terrace, which faces east across the perpendicular skyline of upper Manhattan. Deciding that it was probably safe to walk out onto the terrace, I gazed down into the street. Quite a few people had gathered down there on the sidewalks, oddly enough, and most of them seemed to be gazing curiously skyward, prompting me to look up too. Then I saw them: the brightly colored shimmering shapes of fireworks exploding in the sky, reflected in our apartment windows. My first response was outrage. How could "they"—the authorities, the powers-that-be—have permitted such a frivolous display to shatter our fragile composure, at such a sensitive time? It was only a few days after the second anniversary of September 11, and this was New York City. No more than a beat or two had elapsed, after the first wave of anger subsided, when I felt an enormous sense of relief. No, we were not being attacked, we were not being bombed, we were not being shot at, we were not being killed. Instead, our great city of New York, in its infinite wisdom, had insensitively permitted a fireworks celebration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of Central Park to go forward, apparently unaware that a pyrotechnic display might strongly resemble—sonically speaking—an all-out terrorist attack.

Every summer fireworks go off over Central Park when the New York Philharmonic plays the 1812 Overture, and no one thinks anything of it. Molly, in fact, has long since grown accustomed to the sound of the pinwheels and roman candles and scarcely lets the artillery faze her. But this night was September 14, and was therefore not like other nights. Once Jim and I finally sat down to our pasta and I was at last able to pick up that no longer so deliciously chilled glass of wine, I began to think more consciously about what had just happened to us.

One of things that had happened to us was that the authorities had failed to take into account the state of peoples' nerves two years after a traumatic event. Another thing that had happened to us was that a form of mass hysteria had taken hold, as hundreds of people in the surrounding buildings flowed into the streets, all looking for help, all panic-stricken, all intently convinced that the world—or at least the city—was going up in smoke and that apocalypse was now. A third thing that had happened was more psychological, and was something with which I am intimately familiar. Based on past experience, we had automatically leapt in our minds to the worst-case scenario. Something intended to be celebratory, something intended to be fun—fireworks in the park—had, under these exceptional circumstances, taken on a new, nightmarish tone.

This was yet another example of the reality that while none of us can change the facts of our lives, we can change the interpretations we place on those facts. And we can do so in all sorts of ways that have the power to liberate as opposed to enslave us. A couple of weeks later, I gave a speech to a group of executives at Citicorp in New York. With the traumatic incident of September 14 still fresh in my mind, I advised my audience,

Sometimes it takes a crisis, in a country or in a company, for you to find out who you are, what you stand for, and what you stand against. Sometimes it takes a crisis to really learn what you're made of and what you want to become, and to create. Sometimes it takes a crisis for you to find out what you're really passionate about, and to summon up the energy to create a vision for how good life could be. Those times of crisis are our defining moments.

I asked the assembled executives to stop for a few seconds and think about a defining moment in their own lives, and to look back at that moment, and own it. Everyone has a moment when you decided: a moment when you said, "Here's how it's going to go;" a moment when you stood up for something; a moment when you said "yes;" a moment you said "no." It could be the moment you decided to have the baby. It could be the moment you decided to stay, or decided to leave. It could be the moment you drew a line, or stepped up to the plate, or laid it all on the line—or erased one, if that's what needed to be done. These are the moments of your own personal heroism, which define who and what you are. Lay claim to these moments, which embolden you to step into your power. Those moments, I went on, form a platform from which one can spring into a new life. Those moments, I insisted, can provide us with the energy, the focus, and the courage we need to ride our own particular beams of light to the castle we create in the sky.

I told them about Walt Disney, and how when he created his theme parks, he instructed his crews to "build the castle first." With Cinderella's palace clearly in sight, Disney knew that his employees could always take inspiration from that fairy-tale castle whenever they were tired or discouraged, when they were digging trenches for the castle, when it was hot, when the mosquitoes came out to play.

If you can feel the magic, you can go the distance. Disney understood how a gorgeous vision can propel us forward, how when we are laboring in the swamps and the ditches of our own lives, we can look up at the horizon and see our dream castle, our better life, shimmering and glittering in the distance, pulling us forward and upward.

Facts, I told my audience matter-of-factly, are "measurable, demonstrable, and inarguable." But all of us have a natural tendency to sort of smoosh these facts together in our minds in such a way that the neat conceptual packages we assemble do not always so neatly accord with objective reality. Just as Jim and Molly and I, along with a few hundred other gullible souls in our neighborhood, had leapt to certain erroneous conclusions on that harrowing night in September, we all tend to string together masses of facts and fiction and put them into neat little boxes that are highly plausible, yet at the same time subjective interpretations of reality.

None of this would really matter so much if we didn't then take those interpretations and use them as the basis for decisions, actions, and opinions. "Wars are fought, stocks markets move up and down, divorces are adjudicated, and decisions in life and business are made every day based on interpretation, not fact," I assured my audience of corporate executives. I then asked these high-powered people to envision the possibility that there might be better, higher, more empowering interpretations to be made of the facts that might help us leap to new heights and create entirely new selves. Contrary to popular perception, we do not need to live our lives passively, like watching a movie or TV. We, in fact, write and direct our own movies. We, in fact, get to decide what reality is. We, in fact, possess the power inside us to edit and revise reality as we see fit and to create a new reality that helps us to realize our intrinsic greatness.

Some people—we call them heroes (or trapeze artists)—know how to make the defining moments of their lives count, and they become sterling examples of character. On November 18, 1985, as described in a Houston Chronicle article, the superb violinist Itzhak Perlman played at New York's Lincoln Center. Seeing Perlman walk out on stage is in itself an incredible sight. As a child, he was stricken by polio, and he walks with braces on both legs, perpetually propped up on crutches. The audience watched with a mixture of awe, pity, and admiration as Perlman laboriously, majestically stepped up to his chair, sat down on it, and very slowly and deliberately set his crutches down on the floor before undoing the clasps that bound the braces to his legs. Tucking one foot back and extending the other forward, he slowly and deliberately bent down and picked up the violin and tucked it under his chin. Nodding to the conductor, he began to play.

A few seconds later, a violin string snapped. As the Chronicle described this unforgettable scene, "It went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he would have to do. People who were there that night thought the same thing to themselves: ...'He would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up his crutches and limp his way off stage to either find another violin or else find another string for this one.' "

Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes, and signaled to the conductor to strike up the music again. Without missing a beat, he picked up precisely from where he had left off. That night, even for Itzhak Perlman, was not like other nights. That night, he played with such extraordinary passion and power and purity that he transported us all to a place where it is actually possible to play a major symphonic work for violin with just three working strings. Such a place, of course, does not exist in reality. But that night, Perlman made a conscious decision not to know that, or pay attention to it. That night, he decided not to behave in accordance with the observable facts. According to the Chronicle, you could actually see him modulating, changing, and recomposing the piece in his mind so that it could be played with three strings. At one point, in fact, it almost sounded as if he was detuning the strings to extract entirely new sounds from them— sounds never before created.

When he finished the piece, a split second of silence filled the hall before people spontaneously rose and applauded and laughed, some cheering, some screaming, some weeping. In response, Perlman smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his bow to quiet the audience and softly said to the now quiet room, "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left."

A broken violin string is, of course, not a major crisis, even for a concert violinist. But it can be a significant setback, from which only the greatest musician could possibly have snapped back with such grace and verve. "Sometimes it takes a crisis," I told my audience at Citicorp, "to make us know who we are and what we stand for." It doesn't have to be the Cuban Missile Crisis. It doesn't have to be rushing into a burning building to save a child. It could even be somebody else's crisis. I told them a story from my own life that illustrated the fact that sometimes it's a seemingly small thing. One day about two years ago, I was waiting on Madison Avenue, praying for a cab. It was pouring down rain, and I was wearing a pair of shoes that even on sale I had had no business buying. I had to get a cab or the shoes would be ruined. Magically, a cab appeared. We sped up Madison Avenue and as we stopped at a red light I glanced out the window and saw a young man in this thirties holding a pretty big dog wrapped in a blanket. He looked stricken. After the light changed, and the cab continued racing up Madison Avenue, I said to the driver, "Did you see that guy with the dog?"

"Yeah," he said, shooting me a curious glance in the rearview mirror.

"We've got to pull over," I said, and he did. Getting back out into the rain, I told him, "Stay right here, and whatever you do, don't let anyone take this cab. I bet they need to go to the Animal Medical Center."

"Okay, okay," he said, and trusting that he would do as I asked, I ran two blocks back through the pouring rain and found the guy with the dog. "I've got your cab for you," I said, "come on." Together we ran back up to where, to my astonishment, we saw the taxi driver standing outside his cab in the pouring rain, holding the door open for his new passengers. They got in and away they went. Needless to say, the shoes were never the same.

Other defining moments, by contrast, are truly heroic. Since

September 11, I have often thought of the last moments of Lisa Beamer's husband, Todd, who led the attack on the hijackers that caused the flight bound for the Pentagon to crash into a Pennsylvania meadow instead. Having grasped that he could do something not to save himself or his fellow passengers but the lives of the other potential victims on the ground, Todd Beamer sprang into action. Let's think of the moment he called out to his fellow passengers in the uprising, "Let's roll!"

And they did.

If that's not a defining moment—not just for Todd Beamer, but for all of us—I don't know what is. It was a moment for which everything in his life had been a rehearsal. That is the shout of the man on the flying trapeze as he leaps out into the void. These are not times in which it pays to sit back and wait for the dust to settle, for everything to return to normal. This is our new normal. That was a new normal evening when Jim and I and our dog flipped out on September 14, a new normal evening in which the brave spirit of Todd Beamer was as important an inspiration as Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis were to the Americans of 1927.

Let's take a look at a defining moment in the life of Annika Sorenstam, the great woman golfer, who had a vision of qualifying and competing in the 2003 PGA Colonial Invitational Tournament. To her delight, she did qualify, and she became the first woman to compete in that tournament since Babe Didrikson Zaharias nearly forty years before.

© 2004 by Gail Blanke. All rights reserved. No Part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

About the Author

Gail Blanke is a motivational speaker, executive coach, and president and CEO of Lifedesigns. Her mission is to enable people to thrive on change and master the art of self-reinvention in an unpredictable and insecure world. As the author of the best-selling in My Wildest Dreams: Simple Steps to a Fabulous Life, she has appeared on Oprah, and her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Time, Redbook and Ladies Home Journal.