At first glance September 8, 2009 at 5:09pm Pacific Time looks like an arbitrary moment. It’s just another Tuesday, and the start of just another evening rush hour in California.

But shift your perspective slightly and you notice that Tuesday evening rush hour in California is Wednesday morning rush hour in Japan. Plus, you notice it’s a significant moment since September 8, 2009 at 5:09pm in the Pacific Time Zone is the same moment as September 9, 2009 at 9:09am in the East Asia Time Zone – the time zone that is 9 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.

Call me crazy, but I thought this special moment of 09.09.09+09GMT@09:09 deserved some sort of acknowledgement. So I took a leap of faith and decided to devote every free moment I of 2009 to the pursuit of an idea:

I would invite people around the world to join me at the moment of 09.09.09+09GMT@09:09 for a simultaneous photo shoot in celebration of international peace and artistic collaboration. The event would be called Worldwide Moment.

You might say an idea like this would come from someone with too much time on his hands. And you’d be right – because like many people, 2009 has been a tough year for me. It was a year filled with unemployment, underemployment, and yes, too much extra time.

I ended 2008 unemployed. And then things got worse. My house flooded on January 1st, 2009 and I turned 30
on February 12th. March came and went, and I couldn’t find a job. With every passing day my savings account was depleting and my spirits were doing the same.

But what I lacked in finances, I made up for with hope – and a belief that this Worldwide Moment idea might just get me through the year. Somehow.

*****

I was an only child born to traveling parents.

My mom has been a flight attendant for 40 years, and my dad, before he passed away in 2006, was an international businessman and overseas graduate student. So I always looked at the world as one big neighborhood.

Every day my mom meets and serves hundreds of new people from all around the world on different American Airlines flights. She has learned compassion, patience, generosity, and humility. And I’d like to think she has instilled those lessons in me. (Meanwhile, I have taught her who Pear Jam is, since they were on her flight one day and she had never heard of them before)

My dad also worked for the airlines and spent much of his time traveling as well. He preferred doing business in Japan, studying in France, and SCUBA diving in Honduras, to relaxing at home.

He also loved taking pictures.

When I was 10 years old he gave his old 1970’s 35mm Fujica SLR and a copy of the book “The Kodak Guide to 35mm Photography”.

Maybe he sensed I was interested, maybe he thought photography would be an important skill to learn, maybe he always wanted to be a professional photographer himself and was hoping to live vicariously through me. Whatever his reason for teaching me photography, it worked, and I decided to devote my life to it.

I took summer photography classes in elementary school, joined the yearbook staff in high school, and graduated college with a degree in film studies from the University of Southern California.

It’s no surprise that my work after college required me to travel – and shoot. From 2003 to 2008 I was the touring videographer and photographer for a band on Capitol Records called Mae. I documented their tours around the U.S., Canada, The U.K., and Japan. Then in 2008 I was lucky enough to become a staff videographer for the Obama presidential campaign in Pennsylvania. I documented campaign events, produced videos, and helped run the state’s website. I was honored to support a candidate whom I believed could improve international relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world.

*****
Enter 2009.

The economy has collapsed. The campaign has come to an end. The water heater in my attic has flooded the house. And I simply have no idea what I’m going to do next.

It had been a good ride for many years. But I was afraid that ride had come to and end.

After months of job searching, close-call interviews, and my frustration building day after day, I said “ENOUGH” and decided to go after Worldwide Moment.

I wouldn’t stop my job search. But I would use my free time to help build this thing. I was feeling anything but peace, and I sensed I was not alone. So I decided the best way to turn that around was to invite EVERYONE to join together for a scheduled moment of peace. It might be the only peaceful moment I, or we, feel this entire year. But it might also be the start of something great. It might be a moment where we say goodbye to fear and depression and seclusion and instability and loneliness and say hello to a better life. One of awareness and compassion and education and new communities and opportunities.

I had all the time in the world. So why not give it a shot?

I started with Twitter. It was March and we had 35 followers. I searched for photographers and invited them to join. A photographer from Denver named @TheBigKlosowski had 55,000 followers. So I asked him if he’d like to participate and help spread the word. To my amazement he said yes. I asked a photography studio in Australia, @GWPStudio, who had 50,000 followers, and they said yes. I searched WeFollow.com for “photography”, “photographers”, “peace”, etc. and invited Tweeters with those tags to participate. One by one they said yes.

A girl I’d never met from Tennessee named Brittany started a Facebook group for Worldwide Moment and amassed over 1,000 members in less than two weeks. My friend Parker volunteered to create our first web site. I signed up for Constant Contact’s email subscription services so that we could collect people’s email addresses. A friend-of-a-friend in Toronto helped design a logo. I emailed the co-founder of the iPeace network, a 20,000 person international network of peace supporters. I posted ads on Craigslist and emailed international friends and organizations such as Invisible Children, who are fighting to end the practice of using children to fight wars in Africa. Peace kept saying “yes”. We set up weekly “mini-moments” and invited people to practice by taking a photo on the same time and day of the week as the big Moment would be. My friend Chinako, 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles, helped manage our Flickr page and posted the weekly “mini-moment” results. All of a sudden we had 1,000 followers on Twitter and hundreds of Facebook group members, MySpace friends, and email addresses.

In the meantime, I had been blessed, and I don’t use that word lightly, to have found a job. It was a part-time job, but not only did this job allow me to work, from home, for a great non-profit organization based in D.C., but my job would be to help build and manage their online presence, just as I was doing for Worldwide Moment.

Then summer came and I could not believe the support Worldwide Moment was receiving. People from all over the world were getting excited.

So I stepped it up. I sent out a Tweet asking if there were any web designers out there who would like to build a new website with us. Dan Spencer of Missouri’s FlyGuy Designs was one of the designers to answer the call to arms. His portfolio fit the style I wanted. Dan and I agreed on a fair price to create a brand new website that would count and exhibit not only the number of pledged participants, but the number of countries as well. It would also allow us to write blogs, posts news, and list all our contacts and information about the event.

With the new site looking just how I wanted it I decided to aim for the stars – literally. I heard a story on NPR about a new channel launched by DISH TV that showed a 24-hour-a-day live camera feed of the Earth from a satellite 20,000 miles in orbit. My first thought was “WE HAVE TO HAVE THAT CAMERA TAKE A PICTURE FOR WORLDWIDE MOMENT.”

So I researched and found the contact information for Give The World, the company that provides photos from that satellite for consumers who are interested in a photo of Earth taken on a special day. Well, we needed it not just on a special day, but on a special Moment.

I emailed the CEO of Give The World. He said yes.

But the real “Wow” moment came in early August, about one month before the Moment was to take place. On what I felt was the ultimate of whims I emailed Yoko Ono, a major advocate for the peace movement, and wife of John Lennon. I came across her ImaginePeace.com website which asked the question “What can you do to help the peace movement?”. Well, I started Worldwide Moment to help the peace movement. So I emailed the website and asked if they’d like to participate.

A few days later I was sitting in my room checking the names and locations of people who had pledged to participate when I saw the name “Yoko Ono”. I blinked a few times and questioned whether this was a typo, someone with the same name, or maybe an auto response somehow from her website.

Then a few minutes later I received a Facebook message from a Worldwide Moment supporter who said “Yoko Ono is Tweeting about Worldwide Moment!”. I checked @YokoOno and sure enough she had mentioned our project. I was floored.

That was the game changer, as they say, because Ms. Ono had over 150,000 loyal Twitter followers at the time. Our number of supporters exploded that day. She had even mentioned us on her Facebook page and put us on the homepage of the Imagine Peace website.

At that point I felt like we were on the map and in very good shape. We just had to keep doing what we were doing and this little idea would certainly find its way.
*****

In the waning days before Worldwide Moment I could barely sleep. We were nearing 90 countries with pledged participants. A woman from Iran offered to participate. A student in Sudan and a soldier in Afghanistan did as well.

I sent out a final email to all our pledged participants and reminded them to double-check their local Worldwide Moment time. I auto-scheduled Tweets to be sent out each hour leading up to the Moment. I made sure our website was ready to receive the influx of photos and stories.

Worldwide Moment arrived for me at 8:09pm local time in Virginia. I had spent so much time preparing and organizing and inviting that I hadn’t really thought about what to photograph. In the final 5 minutes before the Moment I found myself at my desk in my room, where I had spent so much time organizing the event. I thought it would be fitting to take a photograph in the location where this idea was born. So I set up a tripod, used a black Sharpie to write “Thank You!” on a white peace of printer paper, and at 8:09pm I took a photo of myself holding the sign up at my desk.

I thought about everyone around the world at that moment. But the highest sense of emotion and sense of completion came in the minutes following. I could not move. I was so relieved and excited and filled with joy and love. I leaned into my computer and said a short prayer for everyone on the other side.

Then I started checking emails and noticed the photos and story submissions came flooding in. In the first minute we had nearly 70 submissions. By the time I went to bed that night at about 5:00AM we had received nearly 500 photos from countries all over the world. It’s now one month later and we have received 1,300 photos and stories from 70 countries who participated in Worldwide Moment.

Worldwide Moment, this little idea I imagined would help get me and us through the pivotal year of 2009 had worked. There are now live exhibits planned for San Francisco, New York, and Florida and interest from a TV show to present the photos during their upcoming broadcast.

I cannot sum up with words the feeling Worldwide Moment brings me. All I can do is invite you to view the results at our website: www.worldwidemoment.org/gallery and our Flickr page: www.flickr.com/worldwidemoment to see how it makes you feel. And what it makes you want to do.

I’d love to hear your feelings, thoughts, and ideas. And I’d love for you to join us next year.

About the Author: Brett Brownell is a photographer, filmmaker, and online organizer living in Chesapeake, Virginia. He co-founded the production company Astorya Entertainment in 2005, whose current release “Dear Jack” is a documentary about musician and Leukemia survivor Andrew McMahon. For more information about Worldwide Moment and to sign up for Worldwide Moment 2010 visit www.worldwidemoment.org. Email Brett: worldwidemoment@gmail.com or reach him via Twitter: @worldwidemoment