Thread by @AlexandraErin

As President Obama reminds us of his vision of 9/11 as a day of service, I remember something I only recently learned about Mr. Rogers (or maybe had forgotten):

He carried a piece of paper in his wallet with a school motto, Life Is For Service.

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It's very easy for people who feel those words to give too much of themselves, to be guilted into staying in toxic situations or doing labor for free when they are skating on the edge of survival, so let's just get it out of the way that life requires balance.

Service doesn't mean servitude.

But these caveats mean that when I read the words "life is for service", I don't immediately feel it. The words don't resonate with me the way they did with Fred Rogers. Not at first.

But I think about my own refrain that humans are social animals, that we are gregarious because looking out for one another is a survival trait. That we are stronger together. That natural selection has led us to try to keep each other alive, not just propagate ourselves.

The first problem we have to solve as humans, the thing that makes us humans, homo sapiens -- in a fantasy novel, we'd be the Thinking Ones or the Wise Kind -- isn't answering the question "how do I survive" but "how do we survive"... how can I keep these people alive?

So, yes, life is for service. Not service as in endless drudgery but service as in, what can I do for my community? What can I do for my neighbors? What can I do for the world? What can I do for the people who need it?

Who needs help, whose needs match what I can do?

Fred Rogers didn't spend his days ministering to the sick, or raising money for the poor. He devoted his life to television. Children's television. Family television. He presented a vision of stability, of safe adult maturity. He showed how things worked. He broke down walls.

He did the work he felt called to do, and he did it well, and he changed the world in a million small ways and some huge ones.

I mean, imagine for a moment if consumer-ready media storage devices weren't legal.

There would have been other test cases along the way and I think eventually the laws would have changed, but when the networks and studios were arguing that recording TV shows was piracy and VCRs should be outlawed, Fred Rogers went before Congress and spoke kindly and patiently.

And he explained that while TV shows broadcast on one schedule, families have all kinds of different schedules, and it was important that parents and children should be able to sit down and watch a show together.

Imagine the ripple effects to our culture if the commercial networks had won that one. I don't think we'd have had streaming shows on the same timeline, if the idea of recording to watch later had been set back a few years.

Think about how much slower personal computing might have advanced if the software industry and the music industry had felt emboldened by victories against TV recordings.

Fred Rogers believed that life is for service, and what he did with his life... well, I think he must have enjoyed it. He certainly found it fulfilling. He did what he was good at, he did it in a way that was sustainable.

It was service. It still pays us all dividends.

The opening song of his show is the one that's most iconic and most referenced, but the closing song is the one that sticks with me the most over the years.

"It's such a good feeling..."

I've talked a bit in recent months about looking at what I'm doing here, both on Twitter and with my life. I've used the word "calling" to describe the work I've done since November 8th, 2016 -- and honestly, leading up to it. It's a vocation. I felt called to do it.

And I still feel called, but I have to make it more sustainable. And I have to balance it against other callings. I'm getting more involved in my own local community, finding ways to serve the neighborhood that serves me.

This is what I'm thinking about, this September 11th... I mean, after my annual thread about the CIA.

Service. Community. Neighborhood.

Anyway, in case you were wondering:

It's such a good feeling, to know you're alive.

And tomorrow, I'm going to do my best to remember when I wake up to say I think I'll make a snappy new day.