The Lone Piper
On September 11th, 2002, I sat preparing my slides and notes at Softworld2002, a North American software conference in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. It was the first anniversary of the attacks. I was scheduled to give the first presentation, and my time slot fell just after the hour when, a year earlier, the planes had struck the Twin Towers in New York.
Today is the 25th anniversary of September 11th, 2001. What returns to me each year, though, is not only that terrible day, but that first remembrance of it, a year later, in a conference hall far from New York. It has taught me something about how our remembrances find their way into the rest of our lives, or fail to.
My topic was business-to-business e-commerce, the subject of my first book. It was new and fertile ground in the software industry, and I expected it to be of real interest to the people in that room. Shortly before I began, the organizer told me there would be a moment of silence. I swallowed hard. I knew the morning would be difficult, but I did not expect what happened next.
The lights dimmed, and a lone piper walked onto the stage. He stood for a few moments, gathering himself, and then began the saddest tune I have ever heard. He probably played for no more than five minutes, but it seemed an eternity. The silence before his first note had already drawn us together, and the music carried every one of us into sadness, and into unity. It was a communal prayer without words, and his ceremonial dress gave it the feel of a liturgy.
His dreadful, beautiful sound seemed to come not only from his pipes but from all of us, a voice with no need for words. Sadness, regret, helplessness, frustration, and love filled that large conference space. And this was happening in Canada, on an island far from New York, among people drawn from across North America. The grief did not stop at any border. It was a spiritual atmosphere no one would have expected at such a “secular” event.
I watched the last glimpse of the white spats over his shoes disappear from the stage, and I felt strangely lost, caught between two worlds. How could I possibly move from that silence to a talk about online commerce?
After what seemed like an age, I walked to the podium. The lights were still dim. Then my first slide appeared on the screen, and the space around me lit up. I think I stumbled out a few unprepared remarks about the solemnity of what we had just shared, and they only made the turn to eBay and Amazon feel more incongruous.
I made my way through the presentation as best I could. The enormous changes the Internet was bringing to commerce, and all the automation tools that came with them, suddenly seemed beside the point. What was truly present in that hall was the human experience of being together, revisiting pain and tragedy with compassion. It did not need to be interrupted. And I, with my slides, was the interruption.
Most of us know some version of that moment. We step out of a hospital room, a funeral, or a quiet hour of prayer, and find ourselves back among emails, errands, and meetings. The two worlds seem as though they cannot belong together. Yet everyone in that hall had to return to their work that day, and I have come to believe the grace was not in leaving the silence behind, but in carrying some of it with us.
Every September 11th, I think of that lone piper and that conference hall, filled for a few precious minutes with shared compassion and communion. Those moments are a grace. They reveal what is already waiting in our hearts: a unity that tragedy uncovers but does not create. We do not have to wait for an overwhelming event to set it free. We can carry it into the ordinary rooms of our lives, even the ones where the lights have come back up, and the slides are already showing.
Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham www.spiritualbreak.com