In a moving ceremony last week, firefighters at the nuclear plant where I work were honored in a badge pinning ceremony. The haunting drone of a bagpiper playing Amazing Grace opened the ceremony as everyone in the room rose.

It was a fitting reminder of the event we commemorate today that claimed the lives of 343 firefighters at the World Trade Center a decade ago.

In the wake of that loss of life, the Federal Emergency Management Agency commissioned a Firefighter Fatality Retrospective Study. The study noted that every year approximately 100 firefighters are killed while on duty and tens of thousands are injured.

The preface to that report noted that, “The World Trade Center disaster represents the largest loss of firefighters in a single incident in the United States since 1947, when 27 firefighters perished in fires and explosions aboard two Texas City ships.”

One of the speakers at the badge pinning ceremony said firefighters are a different breed   — that in a time of crisis they run in when everyone else is running out. As I ate dinner with those firefighters, I realized they are people like you and me, except they’re not. They go to work every day with the full knowledge of the extraordinary things they may be called upon to do. Put simply, their job — day in and day out — is to be heroes.

In a tribute last week to the emergency workers who died on 9/11, Deputy U.S. Fire Administrator Glenn Gaines said:

To those who provide for the public’s safety, there is sweetness to life that the protected shall never know. It is the honor and privilege of wearing the badge and being depended upon to save a life that only the bravest enjoy. They have one very simple job description: they’re expected to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the right stuff.

Firefighters provide a powerful example to act in the face of adversity. While you and I may not be called upon to rush into burning buildings, each of us can do more than we often realize. There are literally thousands of poignant stories about the power of a simple gesture that made a difference to someone shattered by 9/11.

David Wilcox, a singer-songwriter from North Carolina, wrote a song several years ago called Show the Way. It was written before 9/11, but it could just as easily have been written about 9/11.

He once described the song as a plea to not “give up on being the change, like a candle in the dark, just because the world needs so much light. But this song takes it farther and says: even our despair is cause for hope. There is a sacred voltage that burns in our hearts, in our awareness of all that needs to change.”

On this anniversary of 9/11, I offer my version of Show the Way. In response, I welcome your remembrances of where you were and how you felt on that day — and what insight you have gained over the years about the event that changed us all.