It has taken me a couple days to process what happened in Boston. As an editor for a risk management publication, you think it would be easier to be dispassionate about these sorts of things. After all, disasters, or at least potential disasters, are our stock in trade.

If bad things didn’t happen, we wouldn’t need risk management and I wouldn’t have anything to write about.

But every so often, words fail me.

Maybe it’s the visceral nature of a terrorist attack that conjures up memories of how it felt to be in New York on 9/11 or maybe it’s because I’m a runner who remembers how great it always felt to finally approach the finish line and the cheering crowds after a grueling race. Or maybe it’s because I’ve spent plenty of good times in Boston over the years and always considered it the place I’d love to live if I ever left New York.

But the truth is, all those reasons feel trite to me. It’s as if I’m trying to manufacture some kind of spurious connection to the tragedy to somehow make my shock over what happened more real than the next person.

The thing is, we all do it. The cynic in me wonders if it’s to garner additional sympathy or if it’s just a natural psychological tic that helps us cope.

Really though, events like what happened in Boston affect us not because we remember 9/11 or because we’re runners or because we like the Red Sox. They affect us because we’re human. We need no excuses. It’s as simple as that. We care because that’s just what we do.

As my buddy and former boss Bill Coffin put it over at National Underwriter’s Property Casualty 360:

Even in a total loss, there is always recovery. Regeneration. And so it will be with Boston and its magnificent marathon, and with all those who have been so heartsick over the bombing. The humanity that was wounded will be the very thing that carries on and runs that next mile. And the mile after that, and the mile after that. For in the human race, there is no finish line. There is only the road, and the strength to go on, no matter how hard the course.

This tragedy will be dissected in the months and years to come, and we will learn new lessons and develop new plans for managing the risk of events large and small. In the end, we’ll be safer as a whole.

But for now, I think it’s enough, as the Boston College fight song goes, to just be “For Boston.”

(Covered below, for the heck of it, by Boston punks, the Dropkick Murphys.)

For Boston, for Boston,
We sing our proud refrain!
For Boston, for Boston,
‘Tis Wisdom’s earthly fane.
For here all are one
And their hearts are true,
And the towers on the Heights
Reach to Heav’ns own blue.
For Boston, for Boston,
Till the echoes ring again!

For Boston, for Boston,
Thy glory is our own!
For Boston, for Boston,
‘Tis here that Truth is known.
And ever with the Right
Shall thy heirs be found,
Till time shall be no more
And thy work is crown’d.
For Boston, for Boston,
Thy glory is our own!