Five weeks after the towers fell, I moved our first trade show from September to November and opened it anyway. We didn’t think about canceling it. Thousands of people showed up looking for something to hold onto, and it turned out to be one of the finest experiences of my life.
I’ve been thinking about that week again, because this week the country reads the names of the victims from September 11th aloud, one by one, for the twenty-fourth year running. That reading is not a formality. It’s the same fire every year, dressed in a program and a podium.
The job underneath the job
Every culture builds rituals to hold its hardest days in place. A name read aloud. A candle lit. A given moment turned into a moment that gets remembered on purpose. Go back far enough and you get to humans sitting around a campfire, keeping warm, keeping close. People have always gathered when the ground shifted under them, and they gathered because it shifted, not despite it.
That’s the actual job underneath our job. An event organizer isn’t there to entertain. Closer to a docent. A servant leader. The person who knows how to walk you toward what matters and give you a reason to stand there a little longer.
Twenty-five years of steering the names
This week I also want to point to my friend Jacklyn Bernstein of Empire Force Events, who is marking her own twenty-fifth year volunteering to help steer the reading of the names. She is a role model to me, and to the thousands of event professionals quietly volunteering to make their communities better without a byline attached to it.
A few years into that ritual, Jacklyn assigned me and a colleague, Michael Cerbelli, to work on what we called the pit: the actual 9/11 memorial, managing the flowers families placed at the temporary reflecting pools before the permanent memorial existed. That was not nostalgia. That was the return on showing up for people during the worst stretch this industry has ever seen.
Watch for a full profile on Jacklyn later this week.
I don’t think the lesson here is that anyone was brave. It’s older than that. When the ground shifts, people gather. The job is building something worth gathering for.
Thank you to the people who actually plan how it gets done, and execute it flawlessly, so the rest of us can feel the meaning and the purposefulness of the moment
GatheringPoint covers the people who build the gatherings. Subscribe at GatheringPoint.news.
