At 9.40am Monday, Sydney was easing into the last full working week ahead of the Christmas break.

By 9.50am, the city was dealing with the first signs of a terrorist attack in, of all places, a coffee shop.

By the early hours of Tuesday morning two innocent people were dead and several others seriously injured.

The sight of heavily-armed police on the streets of Australia’s biggest city was one we hoped never to see, yet we all knew this day was coming.

And the scenario played out exactly as police suspected - a lone operative carrying out a solo, seemingly random, attack.

“Lone wolf” attacks such as these are planned beyond the reach of the country’s sophisticated anti-terror agencies, and possibly without discussion with any other person.

And a cafe on a Monday morning is about as soft a target as you could want - there were certainly no heavily-armed security guards at that door.

But in just a few short moments a single, armed zealot managed to shake the confidence of an entire nation.

We have been appalled by terror attacks in New York, London and Bali but have still felt a sense of safety due to what used to be known as the “tyranny of distance”.

Now we face the tyranny of proximity as all of us have walked the street outside that unassuming cafe, or one just like it in one of the nation’s busy capital cities.

Yesterday, all of Orange - indeed much of Australia - was thinking how easily it could have been them as a soft target in a very public place at precisely the wrong moment.

Life will never be the same again for those poor few who were trapped inside. The challenge for the rest of us will be how much we allow the events of Monday and Tuesday to change the way we live our lives.