Sixty seconds after takeoff, Dave Sanderson heard the explosion.
“I had never heard anything like that on a plane before,” he recalls.
“I was sitting four rows behind the left wing.
I looked out and saw fire.”
“My first thought was that we had lost an engine,” he says.
“I thought we’d just circle back to LaGuardia and land.”
When the jet hit the river, the impact broke Sanderson’s seat and water poured into the cabin. "
By the time Sanderson made it to an exit, the plane’s wings were partially submerged.
He jumped into the icy water and began swimming to a rescue boat.
“Two people on a ferryboat reached down and pulled me up.
I was so cold, I couldn’t feel a thing,” he says.
Sanderson was unhurt, but he was not unchanged.
He began speaking about his experience at Red Cross fundraisers.
Last year, he resigned from Oracle to devote himself to fundraising and speaking.
“The crash changed my perspective,” he says.
“I started scheduling around my family instead of my job.”
Midlife jolts can derail us or they can propel us into reclaiming and remaking our lives.
They want their lives to matter."
“It’s not just about being resilient,” he says.
“Resilience is when you get punched, stagger and then jump right back up.
Post-traumatic growth is different when you stand back up, you are transformed.”
Their relationships with others grow deeper, and they may seek a stronger spiritual dimension in their lives.
From revelation to remarkable change
Not all jolts arrive with the drama of a crashing airliner.
“When he came back about 10 minutes later, I could tell he’d been crying.
He said to me, ‘One hundred years and nothing has changed.’
"
Leivas-Andino already knew that Paolo, then 28, was gay.
He’d revealed that eight years earlier, but it didn’t have the effect he’d hoped for.
“Instead, it became the elephant in the room.”
