The Moments That Divide Time
September 11, memory, and the strange human experience of living in “before” and “after”
There are dates we remember because the calendar tells us to. Birthdays, anniversaries, Christmases, beginnings of school years, ends of financial years; little human attempts to put fences around the otherwise relentless movement of time. Then there are other dates that require no reminder at all. We do not so much remember them as remain somehow attached to them. Mention the date, the event, sometimes merely a name, and suddenly we know where we were, who was beside us, what room we were standing in, what we were doing moments before, and something of how the world felt when it was still the world we understood.
September 11 is one of those dates.
Twenty-five years have now passed since the attacks of September 11, 2001, when 2,977 people from 90 countries were killed in New York, at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93. The annual commemorations quite properly belong first to those people, their families, those who survived and those whose lives and health were altered by what happened that day. Yet September 11 also belongs to that smaller collection of historical moments when millions of people, including people thousands of kilometres away from the event itself, can locate themselves in time simply by being asked: Where were you when you heard?
I find myself interested in that question this year, perhaps even more than in the customary invitation to remember the event itself. There is something profoundly human about our ability to pinpoint moments when life changed direction, when history seemed briefly to become tangible and we sensed sometimes immediately, sometimes only in hindsight, that whatever came next would not be quite the same as whatever had existed five minutes earlier.
There need be no judgement in that observation. The moment may be terrible or wonderful, public or intensely private. A child is born. A parent dies. A diagnosis is given. A war begins. A war ends. Somebody says yes. Somebody says goodbye. A country changes government. A wall comes down. A plane strikes a building. A doctor says the treatment has worked. A telephone rings in the middle of the night. A person walks through an airport arrivals gate and somehow the life waiting on the other side becomes their life from that moment forward.
The common feature is not tragedy or joy. It is discontinuity.
Something happened, and time acquired a hinge.
When memory creates a before and an after
Psychologists have been interested in this phenomenon for decades. In 1977, Roger Brown and James Kulik introduced the term flashbulb memory to describe those unusually vivid memories we form around learning of surprising and consequential public events. The classic question became familiar: Where were you when you learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated? Later generations produced their own versions around the Challenger disaster, the death of Princess Diana, September 11 and other events that seemed suddenly to breach the boundary between public history and private experience.
The name is wonderfully evocative but slightly misleading. A flashbulb memory can feel like a photograph sharp, complete and preserved exactly as it happened; while research tells us that human memory remains human memory. Details can shift. We may become confused about precisely who told us, what we were doing, even aspects of how we initially felt. Studies following people after September 11 found that confidence in these memories could remain remarkably high even while the consistency of particular details declined. What seems distinctive is not necessarily photographic accuracy but the extraordinary vividness and conviction with which the memory is experienced.
I rather like that distinction because it says something deeper about how we live with consequential moments. We may not preserve an immaculate recording of them, but we preserve their location in the architecture of our lives.
Memory researcher Michael Shum described significant events as temporal landmarks: points we use to organise autobiographical memory much as physical landmarks help us navigate space. When trying to remember when something happened, we often locate it in relation to another significant event such as before we moved house, after Dad died, during the first lockdown, before the children were born, around the time I changed jobs. These events become reference points from which the rest of the personal timeline can be reconstructed.
That sounds academically neat until we recognise how naturally we already speak this way.
That was before Mum got sick.
We met just after I moved to Sydney.
The business started before COVID.
That happened when the boys were still little.
It was after the accident but before I went back to work.
We are constantly locating ourselves by landmarks.
Indeed, subsequent research has described what is called the living-in-history effect: the tendency to use major public events as reference points when organising our own autobiographical memories. Historical time and personal time become entangled. The public event becomes part of the private calendar. Research with people who lived through periods of major social and political transition has found that collective events can become significant anchors for dating entirely personal memories, particularly when the event materially changed everyday life.
September 11 is an extraordinary example because its reach extended so far beyond the places physically attacked. For people directly present in New York, Washington or Pennsylvania, there was of course an entirely different level of proximity and exposure. Neuroscientific research led by Tali Sharot and Elizabeth Phelps found that New Yorkers who had been physically closer to the World Trade Center demonstrated particularly strong emotional-memory responses when recalling September 11 several years later. Proximity mattered. Yet studies across countries also found enduring flashbulb-style memories among people who had been nowhere near the United States. The historical event had entered their personal narrative nonetheless.
That is perhaps what these world-pivoting moments do. History stops being something happening somewhere else and arrives, however briefly, in the room with us.
The ordinary moment beside the extraordinary one
What has always fascinated me about September 11 memories is how ordinary the surrounding details often are.
People were making coffee.
Driving home.
Putting children to bed.
Working late.
Watching television.
Sitting in restaurants.
Answering telephones.
For many of us in Australia, the attacks unfolded late in the evening. The first aircraft struck the North Tower at 8:46 am in New York which is 10:46 pm on Australia’s east coast. By shortly after eleven that night, Australian viewers watching live television had seen a second aircraft strike the South Tower and understood, along with the rest of the world, that whatever they were witnessing was not an accident.
It is this collision between the ordinary and extraordinary that seems to give such memories their peculiar texture. One minute the world contains unfinished washing, tomorrow’s meeting, something somebody has said over dinner and whether there is enough milk for breakfast. Then something happens somewhere perhaps in the next room, perhaps on the other side of the planet, and suddenly those mundane details become scenery surrounding a dividing line.
We remember the coffee because it was the coffee from before.
We remember sitting on that particular couch because we were sitting there when the outside world entered the room.
We remember the telephone ringing because there was a version of our life immediately before answering it and another version immediately afterwards.
Research into how memory segments experience helps explain something of this. Human consciousness receives life as a continuous stream, but memory does not store it as one uninterrupted film. We divide experience into events and episodes, and boundaries between events help organise what is subsequently remembered. Experimental research suggests that perceptible event boundaries can become anchor points around which memory is structured, particularly when emotional significance changes abruptly.
In other words, perhaps before and after is not merely poetic language. It describes something fairly fundamental about the way our minds make sense of experience.
The fascinating part is that we do this with happy moments too.
There is the life before meeting someone and the life after meeting them. The years before becoming a parent and the peculiar reorganisation of identity that follows. The morning before receiving extraordinary news and the afternoon in which possibilities suddenly seem larger. Migration can create such a boundary. So can graduation, falling in love, discovering a vocation, recovering from an illness or finally leaving a situation one had thought would last forever.
Sometimes we know immediately that the hinge has moved. More often we do not.
There are moments that arrive carrying their own announcement - everything has changed - and others whose importance becomes visible only backwards. Twenty years later we realise that accepting one invitation, walking into one room, taking one telephone call or meeting one apparently unremarkable person redirected everything that followed.
That retrospectiveness matters because human lives are not merely sequences of things that happened to us. We continually turn them into stories. We interpret beginnings and endings. We decide which events were turning points, which were interruptions and which were simply Tuesday. Narrative psychologists have long been interested in this process because identity itself partly emerges from the stories through which people connect past experience to the person they understand themselves to be now. Research on turning-point memories shows that people frequently identify experiences that altered not merely circumstance but their understanding of themselves and the direction of their lives.
This does not mean every difficult event needs to become a lesson, nor that every loss must eventually reveal some hidden gift. I am wary of that kind of compulsory meaning-making because it can become strangely cruel. Sometimes something dreadful happened and it was dreadful. Sometimes there is no redemptive bow to tie around the story. What seems more universally human is simply the need to locate what happened somewhere within the continuing narrative: this occurred; I was there; life looked like this beforehand; afterwards, somehow, it looked different.
The world changes, and then Tuesday eventually returns
There is another strange quality to pivot moments. At first they seem enormous enough to consume all available reality.
On September 11, 2001, television schedules vanished. Airports closed. Financial markets stopped. Families searched for loved ones. Governments convened emergency meetings and people around the world remained fixed to screens watching images so extraordinary that they seemed almost impossible to absorb. Twenty-five years later we know something of the enormous political, military, cultural and social consequences that followed, although those consequences were certainly not visible in their entirety that morning.
Yet even after a moment that seems to stop time, clocks eventually begin behaving like clocks again.
People become hungry.
Children need collecting.
Bills arrive.
Someone has to buy groceries.
The dog still needs walking.
There is something almost offensive about the ordinariness of life continuing after a moment that has changed everything, particularly after personal grief. People who have experienced bereavement will know the peculiar shock of discovering that buses continue to arrive, strangers laugh in cafés and somebody somewhere is irritated because their takeaway order is late. Your world has shifted on its axis and the person beside you is comparing tomatoes.
Perhaps, however, this return of ordinary time is not indifference. It may simply be how human beings survive discontinuity.
The extraordinary moment becomes incorporated into the ordinary life that follows it.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was serving as a newly elected senator for New York on September 11, has written this week about the long aftermath of the attacks: the recovery effort, the health consequences for first responders and residents, the years of policy work that continued after public attention had moved elsewhere. Towards the end of that reflection, she writes that “Never forget remains not just a slogan but a solemn promise.”
Whatever one’s politics, and this reflection is not really about politics, I find something compelling in her emphasis on the long tail of a moment. Because the thing about days that change the world is that the world still has to be lived in afterwards.
September 11 did not finish on September 11. Neither does a diagnosis finish when the doctor delivers it. A birth does not finish in the delivery room. A death does not conclude at the funeral. A relationship does not disappear the day two people separate. A great opportunity continues reshaping a lifelong after the excitement of receiving it has faded.
Pivot points are moments, but their consequences unfold across years.
Perhaps that is why anniversaries can be unexpectedly powerful. They return us not merely to the event but to every version of ourselves that has existed since it happened. The twenty-five-year anniversary of September 11 is particularly striking because an entire adult generation now exists with no personal memory of the event. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum estimates that around 100 million Americans are now too young to remember that day firsthand. For them, September 11 is history in the conventional sense. For those old enough to remember, it remains something else as well: a place on their own timeline.
That generational difference itself is fascinating.
One person’s lived memory eventually becomes another person’s textbook.
The Second World War was once something millions remembered waking up inside. For later generations it became photographs, documentaries, museums and stories told by grandparents. The moon landing moved from live television into archive footage. The fall of the Berlin Wall shifted from astonished human beings standing on concrete and swinging hammers into a chapter of twentieth-century history. Eventually COVID-19 will undergo the same transformation. Children who currently hear adults say “during lockdown” will one day explain the pandemic to people for whom those strange months have no autobiographical texture at all.
History continually performs this trick. It turns experience into memory and memory into story.
Our private September Elevens
The public events are easy to recognise because millions of people share them. Personal pivot points are quieter, although they may be no less consequential.
Every person has dates that would mean absolutely nothing to almost everyone else.
The Tuesday the pathology results arrived.
The Saturday afternoon somebody proposed.
The morning a child was born.
The day the police called.
The night somebody finally admitted they were not okay.
The afternoon an application was accepted.
The moment an elderly parent looked across the room and, for the first time, did not recognise the person looking back.
The conversation in which somebody forgave you.
The conversation in which they did not.
The day you packed a suitcase.
The day you came home.
These moments never appear in newspapers, but within a human life they can possess all the force of history.
I suspect this is why sitting with September 11 can become something broader than commemorating one historical tragedy. The date reminds us that time is not experienced evenly. Twenty-five years on a calendar may be precisely twenty-five years, but memory does not measure distance with anything so orderly. Some afternoons from last month have already disappeared almost completely, while a moment from decades ago remains sufficiently vivid that we could walk back into the room.
The science offers an important correction here: vivid memory should not automatically be mistaken for perfectly accurate memory. William Hirst and colleagues followed more than 3,000 people’s memories of September 11 and found that details did change over time, particularly during the first year, before memories became relatively stable. Yet the subjective certainty surrounding those memories often remained powerful. Memory is reconstructive rather than reproductive; we do not simply retrieve a recording but continually rebuild the past from stored details, emotion, subsequent knowledge and repeated telling.
I do not think that makes these memories less meaningful. If anything, it may make them more interesting. We are not archives. We are storytellers.
The mind appears less interested in producing an unedited documentary of everything we have lived through than in constructing enough continuity to answer some fairly important questions: Where have I come from? What happened to me? What changed? Who was I then? Who am I now?
Certain moments become the punctuation marks. Some are commas. Some are full stops. Some begin entirely new paragraphs. And a very small number seem to divide the whole manuscript into two volumes: before and after.
Perhaps remembering is also a way of taking stock
Anniversaries invite remembrance, but perhaps they also offer something else: perspective.
When we return mentally to a pivot point, we have an unusual opportunity to notice distance. We can see not only what happened then, but what has happened since. Sometimes that distance is painful. Sometimes it is astonishing. Occasionally we realise that the person who lived through the original moment would scarcely recognise the life we inhabit now.
There is something psychologically useful about temporal landmarks in this sense. Research on birthdays, new years and other meaningful dates suggests that people use temporal boundaries not simply to organise memory but to compare versions of themselves and contemplate change. The calendar gives us artificial boundaries; life supplies its own.
Perhaps today, then, is not only an occasion to ask Where was I on September 11? It might also invite the larger question: What are the moments by which I divide my own life?
What events created a before and after for me?
Which ones did I recognise immediately?
Which ones took years to understand?
Which moments that once seemed catastrophic eventually became incorporated into a much larger story?
Which joyful moments quietly redirected everything?
Which people entered my life and altered its trajectory simply by being there?
Which version of myself exists only on the far side of something that happened?
There may even be value in noticing how differently we understand our pivot points with the benefit of time. An event that once appeared to be an ending may now look more complicated. Something celebrated as a beginning may have taken us somewhere we never anticipated. A decision once regarded as a mistake may have introduced people, knowledge or possibilities we would otherwise never have encountered. Conversely, something we once desperately wanted may eventually have revealed costs we could not have imagined.
That is not revisionism so much as perspective. Events do not change, but our relationship with them can.
The person remembering is no longer the person who first experienced the event.
That may be one of the reasons anniversaries feel so peculiar. We revisit the past carrying twenty-five additional years of ourselves with us.
When the world pivots
September 11 is rightly remembered because real people died, families were shattered and consequences continued long after the television pictures disappeared. We should resist turning somebody else’s tragedy into merely a convenient metaphor about personal growth. Yet alongside remembrance there is something universal in what that day demonstrates so starkly: human beings live much of life assuming tomorrow will resemble today until, occasionally, it does not.
Most mornings do not change history.
Most telephone calls do not divide a life.
Most people we meet will not redirect our future.
Most days disappear gently into all the other days.
And then there is one that does not.
Perhaps that is why we remember where we were.
Not because the brain has somehow taken a flawless photograph, but because something in us recognised a boundary. The world on one side of that moment was no longer entirely available to us, and whatever came next would have to be negotiated from the other side.
Twenty-five years after September 11, millions of people will again remember offices, living rooms, telephone calls, television screens, colleagues and family members. They will remember people who are no longer alive. They may remember younger versions of themselves with an almost unsettling clarity. The details will differ, as memories do, but many will share that strange sensation of being able to locate the instant when history entered personal time.
And perhaps, somewhere within that remembrance, there is room to acknowledge all the other hinges that divide our lives. The moments we chose. The moments that chose us. The ones we celebrated and the ones we endured. The global moments when millions of lives pivoted together and the private ones witnessed by nobody but ourselves.
We cannot know which ordinary morning will eventually become a landmark. That is one of life’s more unsettling and, occasionally, beautiful truths. We spend so much of our time looking forward towards the milestones we expect birthdays, promotions, graduations, retirements, while some of the most consequential moments arrive without appointments.
Only afterwards do we draw the line. There was life before this. And then this happened. And here we are.
Perhaps remembrance, at its deepest, is simply our way of honouring that strange architecture of human life: acknowledging that time moves continuously while we do not experience it that way at all. We experience chapters, thresholds, beginnings, endings and moments when the familiar world suddenly rearranges itself around us.
September 11, 2001, was such a moment for the world. Each of us, eventually, will know others of our own.
And maybe the reflective work is not to force them into categories of good or bad, blessings or curses, things we should be grateful for or experiences we should somehow have “grown from”. Life is rarely that obedient. Perhaps it is enough sometimes to recognise the hinge, honour what existed on both sides of it, and notice the extraordinary human capacity to keep constructing a life after the world we knew has changed.
Because eventually that may be what memory is trying to help us do. Not simply remember what happened, but understand where we are now in relation to the moment when everything moved.
References and further reading
Brown, R., & Kulik, J. (1977). Flashbulb memories. Cognition, 5, 73–99. Their foundational work introduced the concept of vivid autobiographical memories surrounding the reception of consequential public news. A contemporary review of the subsequent research and debates is available through the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Clinton, H. R. (2026). What the Aftermath of 9/11 Taught Me. The Atlantic, 10 September 2026. Clinton reflects on September 11 from her experience as a U.S. senator for New York and, importantly, on the years of human consequences that followed the event itself.
Hirst, W., Phelps, E. A., Buckner, R. L., et al. (2009). Long-term memory for the terrorist attack of September 11: Flashbulb memories, event memories, and the factors that influence their retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138(2), 161–176. The study followed more than 3,000 people and demonstrated both the persistence and fallibility of flashbulb memories.
Laing, P. A. F., & Dunsmoor, J. E. (2025). Event segmentation promotes the reorganization of emotional memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 37(1), 110–134. The research examines how event boundaries can help organise emotionally meaningful memories.
Sharot, T., Martorella, E. A., Delgado, M. R., & Phelps, E. A. (2007). How personal experience modulates the neural circuitry of memories of September 11. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(1), 389–394. The study demonstrated differences in emotional-memory processes among New Yorkers according to their proximity to the World Trade Center attacks.
Shum, M. S. (1998). The role of temporal landmarks in autobiographical memory processes. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 423–442. Shum’s review explores how major events, first experiences and other landmarks help organise autobiographical memory and assist us in locating events across our personal timelines.
National September 11 Memorial & Museum. (2026). 25th Anniversary Commemoration and 9/11 FAQs. The Museum records 2,977 people killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks and is marking the twenty-fifth anniversary through remembrance, education and the annual reading of victims’ names.
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