There are some moments that change things for ever. We all have them. They can be the shortest events - a gunshot, an ill-chosen word, a bad decision. Like a stone in the pond, you could blink and miss the impact, but the ripples are hard to ignore.
Today, the USA and the civilised world are soberly remembering the horrific events of one morning, ten years ago. It's easy to forget the sense of fear and uncertainty that followed that day - what had happened had been so utterly awful and real. No-one knew whether that was it, or whether every major city, every landmark and every one of us, were also targets.
The ripples of course are easy to see, looking back. Two terrible wars, many thousands of lives wrecked and a world that still lives in the shadow of the war on terror. We watched the world change in a single morning.
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In the midst of all of this, I found myself thinking about hope today. On September the 11th, I was curled up in the living room, watching it all unfold in front of my eyes. Hope could not have been further from my mind as the second plane screamed into the South Tower. And what of hope when those buildings crumpled into piles of acrid dust and rubble?
Yet in despair, there is always room for hope. Obama himself, titled his book The Audacity of Hope. It was based (indirectly) on a painting by GF Watts showing a blindfolded woman, desperately clutching a harp and playing the one remaining string. I don't fully know what the book is about, but I love the phrase, the audacity of hope; that in the very heart of desperation and sadness, hope can be the smallest sound or the tiniest spark, audaciously defying the darkness.
My situation is not desperate, but there are times when I despair. It's always good to be reminded that hope can triumph when all else fails.
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