Eight years ago, my daughter told me that we all have invisible wires that connect us to the people that we love… wires that cannot be broken by time, by space or even by death. As an airline pilot, I often thought about those wires as I flew passengers back and forth across the country. Hurtling along in a metal tube six miles above the Earth's surface at just below the speed of sound, a bunch of strangers had entrusted me with their lives. Did we have invisible wires that connected us as well?

And then, one night on a flight from St. Louis to Newark, I randomly asked my captain what it was like to be in the air on the morning of September 11. As he recounted his story and I reflected on my own memories of 9/11, I remembered that for a brief moment in time, the entire world was connected in a shared grief that knew no ethnic, religious or national boundaries. Drifting off to sleep that night, I saw the image in my mind of a young boy with scared eyes asking a flight attendant in an empty plane, "are we in Los Angeles?" As I flew another planeload of strangers from Newark back to St. Louis the next morning, I pulled out a piece of paper and began to scribble notes about two strangers in an airplane forced together by tragedy… and about the invisible wires that connect us all.