Heavenly

There have been a few times in my life when I feel that some great or significant human experience has happened without me, or that my comprehension of these events came delayed, at some significant interval after the events themselves.

This happened with September 11th, 2001, when I was on my mission. I was tracting that morning, and I still remember knocking on people's doors, hearing varied reports from them and wondering what exactly was going on. I didn't have access to television or the radio; I just had scattered conversations with people about it, or saw photographs of buildings with smoke pouring out of them. But I didn't catch the full scope of the thing until long after I came home, when I watched the footage from the collapsing towers on the one-year anniversary in 2002. I finally understood why it had shocked and stirred the nation, what it felt like to watch as the towers collapsed, realizing just how many people were still inside, and to share a strange empathy with those who had chosen to jump from the towers before they fell, certain of their own inevitable deaths.

I know I didn't really have time to do it, but tonight I went and saw In the Shadow of the Moon anyway. And I suddenly understood what it would have been like to be alive in 1969, when the world focused on a group of three men who made the journey to the moon--the moon--and came back. I am awed. And there's something wonderfully transcendent in this realization that we as human beings have lifted ourselves off of this planet, our home, and have traversed, for just a few days, on the finely powdered surface of another world.

I wept; I couldn't help it. This thing was bigger than something I could hold in myself. And I feel a sense of wonder at this thing that we, as human beings, accomplished.

I hope that there are things as great that we still have yet to do.