9/12/07:

"Learning by Being There" - by Jason Senjem

I believe in the things I’ve learned by “being there.” “Being there” to me is experiencing the extraordinary while doing the ordinary.  I can think of three vivid memories I have about “being there” and how I learned from those moments.

Ten years ago this month, I crossed the Atlantic on my first trip abroad.  As a young serious graduate student, I was prepared to present a few research papers in London.  I arrived to the sweet smell of roses that seemed to be stacked waist deep throughout the city.  I found out that I was staying just a couple doors down from St. James Palace where Princess Diana was lying in state.  The next day I watched as the Prince of Wales and his sons walked sadly behind their mother’s casket.  An enormous feeling of shared grief seemed to connect everyone.  That week, everywhere in London I went, it was as if people had unplugged themselves from their virtual lives, stopped their busyness, and became aware of each other—aware that we were all the same, all mortal.  That week “being there” meant experiencing the beauty of community and the beauty of true civility.

Four years later, I was two weeks into my first year as a professor at Syracuse University.  It was a nice sunny morning and particularly so because I found out my wife was pregnant.  Needless to say, I was ecstatic… until I went to work.  It was September 11, 2001.  That was a tough week as many of our students had interned that summer in the World Trade Center.  I especially remember one student who broke down crying, exasperated in my office.  I remember thinking why is this young woman, born in Puerto Rico, grown up in New York City, frightened because she didn’t know if her friends were alive and hadn’t heard from her father who worked in the towers, why was she in my office and how could I, a new professor, a white man, raised on a farm in Minnesota, possibly relate to her?  So I asked her kindly and naively, why did you come here?  She said, “Because you are the only one who talks about the 9/11 attacks in class.”  I think what I learned from that is “being there” means serving one another in unexpected ways when we do our everyday work.

In the following weeks, the pregnancy we had celebrated that September morning became our third miscarriage.  The following November, however, after several sleepless nights of false labor and an emergency c-section, my little baby girl was born.  I discovered right there in her borning cry that “being there” is about life itself and in realizing how precious it is to just “be there.”