On September 11, 2001, I was at home with my three-month-old baby, watching the events unfold on CNN. I was deeply worried about our crew.

I received a call from work. I wanted to go in, to be there and do something. But I made myself stay at home with my baby. I knew that being there would not have meant I could actually do more. Still, it was difficult simply to watch from a distance.

Looking back, September 11 was, for me, the moment the world changed. Working in aviation, I also felt the events reach into my own everyday life, my work and the lives of people around me.

I next visited New York about a year after the attacks. What had happened stayed with me then, and it still does. Now, 25 years later, the memories return often and still cause me distress.

The years that followed brought the 2004 tsunami, the Malaga bus crash, the volcanic ash cloud that brought air traffic to a standstill, and countless other crises. Natural disasters, accidents and wars. These are different events, not a continuation of any single one. But in my memories, they are connected by concern for people and the need to do something when so much is beyond our control.

Of course, the world was neither safe nor free from suffering before September 2001. Yet something in the way I saw it changed permanently that day.

To me, 9/11 means, above all, remembering the people. Those who lost their lives, those left behind to grieve, and those who had to carry on living with what had happened.

The world was never the same again.