“Any of them.”

Those are the words I remember most from September 11, 2001.

I had been up most of the night with my sick 18-month-old son and had just gone to sleep when my dad called. That wasn’t unusual. We talked every day.

But the tone of his voice was different.

“Hey, Sis. Turn on your TV.”

I told him I’d been up all night and really needed to get some sleep.

“Go turn on your TV.”

“Okay. I’m on the couch. What channel?”

There was a long pause.

My dad was emotional, and when he finally answered, his voice was very quiet.

“Any of them.”

When I asked him what had happened, he was fighting back tears.

Then he told me the Twin Towers had been hit by passenger planes, and that it appeared to be intentional.

I remember feeling like my heart sunk. I couldn’t comprehend what he was telling me and what I was seeing.

“How could someone do that? Why would anyone do that?”

I sat on the couch that day glued to the television, trying to understand. I kept looking at my little boy and wondering if we were safe.

There is another part of that phone call that I understand differently now.

Years before September 11, I survived a plane crash. My recovery was long, and my dad was there through so much of it.

Looking back, I believe another reason why he wanted to be the one to call me that morning.

He knew what seeing passenger planes crash into those buildings might bring back for me. I think he wanted to be the one to tell me. And, in the way dads do even when their children are grown, I think he was trying to protect me and make sure I was okay when I learned what had happened.

Twenty-five years later, that’s the part that gets me.

My dad is no longer here. But I can still hear his voice on the other end of that phone. I can still hear that long pause when I asked him, “what channel?”

“Any of them.”

There is something else about September 11 that I don’t want us to forget.

We came together as a country.

In the years that followed, I continued helping people make decisions about their careers. One of the questions I’ve always asked is: Why? Why are you interested in this path? Why does it matter to you?

After September 11, I began hearing an answer I hadn’t heard in quite the same way before:

“I want to serve my country because of what happened on 9/11.”

I heard it again and again.

Many of those people are still serving our country today.

Early in my career, I also worked as a 911 dispatcher. I cannot imagine what the dispatchers working that day experienced or what it took to remain calm on the other end of those calls while chaos was unfolding around them.

The same goes for the firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and countless others who ran toward something everyone else was desperately trying to escape.

A lot has happened in 25 years.

The world has changed. Things have evolved. We have evolved.

But one of the things I remember most about the days and weeks after September 11 was how much we came together.

United we stand. Divided we fall.

We heard those words everywhere then. Twenty-five years later, I think they’re worth remembering again.

There was nothing good about what happened on September 11. Nearly 3,000 lives were lost, families were forever changed, and the effects of that day are still being felt.

But there was something good in how people responded to it.

People helped strangers. Communities came together. People looked for ways to serve. And, for a time, many of the things that normally separated us didn’t seem quite as important.

Maybe remembering September 11 shouldn’t only be about remembering what happened to us.

Maybe it can also be about remembering who we were for one another afterward.

We don’t need a national tragedy to find our way back to that.

We can start with the small, everyday things.

Helping someone who needs it. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Listening before judging. Checking on a neighbor. Thanking someone who serves. Looking for what we have in common before focusing on where we disagree.