It was the thought of the couple gathering extreme courage together, holding hands as they leapt 100 storeys, leaving their workplace, their families, and their lives anonymously linked forever to this terrible day in history that brought it all home. One can only feel such sorrow for total strangers, two of us, joined in the family of mankind.

Nothing has come so close to us all. The Vietnam War, which entered our own personal living room so graphically and tragically every night over a fifteen-year period, realised 55,000 lost souls.

In a matter of hours, the eerie parallels stare you in the face. Grieving relatives with cell phones in long lines at hospitals and morgues.

The bridges and highways out of New York silently full of only people walking home, are juxtaposed with all too common daily media sights; long lines of refugees in various third world countries fleeing blank-faced and silent from their bombed out homes.

A family relative worked at the World Trade Center. Evacuating his building ten minutes before the second plane imploded, he understood when glancing upward that so many of his friends and co-workers in the area of truncation were gone.

He was one of the lucky ones, but even he could not go home to grieve that day as all public transportation was cut off out of the city, his car, along with hundreds of others, crushed in the debris.

Small neighbourhoods where many of these finance and investment professionals lived are forever missing people; Mommys and Daddies that went to work on a Tuesday morning and just never came home.

At the time, US capital markets only staggered briefly, then bravely resumed the long tradition of our free enterprise system. The decimated investment firms, suffering from the horrendous voids in intellectual capital have not only managed to survive, but by all accounts are thriving in this continuing bear market. How you say, can they do this? Because they must.

It is not mercenary; above all and in spite of unspeakable tragedy, orderly financial markets must be maintained. The world community today is interdependent; major nations and their monetary systems played their part by stepping in to support liquidity in the markets that could open. The United States Federal Reserve also acted immediately to increase money supply, even to hundreds of truckloads in additional cash to banks, thereby calming panicky investors.

For individual investors, selling in unstable times is not a good idea; logic becomes transcended by pure emotion. Corporate America will endure, and so will we.

Consider what has taken place in the weeks and months past for all those survivors. After the sad good-byes are said, reality sets in. Life must go on; cash is needed to buy essentials, food, diapers, transportation, and medicine. Children are born. Children go back to school. Children graduate. Those without partners must cope with a one-income family. Those who are vulnerable need help more than ever. Finances must be reviewed; insurance claims will need to be sorted out; employment must be resumed; a semblance of normality and structure will return.

Bermuda, too, has shared publicly and privately in this most defining act of the 21st century, losing our own and many others who worked for firms that support our economy.

In times of trouble, everyone looks to our common family unity for the emotional and practical support that has always seems to be provided. In remembrance of that tragic day, this is a good time to reach out to your own family. Use this opportunity to mend fences. You need them and they need you. Do something for someone today, extra, unasked and un-noticed. Do this for your own soul.

More than ever before, we should be grateful and use this time for community building. If you have had hard thoughts and hard words about the way things are going, hold them back for now. This is not the time.

Let us take inspiration from the resilience of the citizens of New York, absolutely determined to carry on. Let us all pull together in this community of ours to make positive change. It is the only community we have, and we are so fortunate; ours is still intact!