Fourteen years ago today, our world changed forever. The United States was hit with the most violent terrorist attack that we have yet known, and this was followed by an increasing amount of civilian attacks around the globe. We could no longer pretend that we lived in safety, could no longer embrace idyllic, imaginative childhoods of the past. Our internal worlds became one of fear, of paranoia, of cynicism.

With the advent of social media and interconnectivity, we shared and further embraced this culture of hopelessness. Very little shocked us anymore, and boundaries were pushed in the entertainment industry to deliver stories and characters that were more fantastic than what we saw on the news. Unfortunately, in large part, this notion of “more fantastic” did not mean “fantastical” but, rather, more egregious, designed to deliver the highest shock value. We especially see this today in gossip rags, reality shows, and celebrities themselves who have become monstrous caricatures of their original (and hopefully true) selves.

It’s a big, complex issue that I am simplifying a bit here for brevity’s sake, but I see the September 11 attacks as one of the major catalysts of our current cultural climate. Our children are growing up too quickly these days, foregoing their sense of wonder and possibility for the bleak reality they see immediately before them. Adults live day in and day out in a fog of fatigue and despair, not happy with where they are but not imagining other possibilities with enough hopefulness to motivate themselves to make the necessary changes. We fantasize, but we don’t pursue.

For the past decade and a half, we’ve lived in fear of what’s around the corner, wondering when the next metaphorical (and not-so-metaphorical) bomb will drop. Fear isn’t a sustainable emotion, and our bodies will adjust to it as it does other bad sensations, like pain: your senses will dull, you’ll acclimate to your new definition of “normal,” and suddenly it will take so much more to break through your hardened state.

I noted this last year with the release of The Giver movie. While things naturally progress and change, especially in literature, I had rightly predicted this movie’s failure: the world is a vastly different place than it was in 1993, when Lois Lowry first wrote the book, and it was not going to translate well to today’s movie-going audience. If you haven’t read the book, you can read up on the summary here, but this isn’t a book review. What matters is that this quiet, beautiful, introspective tale is completely out of place with the vast majority of today’s youth, who expect their young-adult literature and especially films to be more along the action-oriented lines of The Hunger Games and Divergent. The filmmakers must have realized this, because they altered the script to include ridiculous action sequences (among other changes). It was meant to appeal to the masses, and the masses wouldn’t have responded well to the scant external stimuli of the original tale.

By and large, I feel that, for the first few years after September 11, 2001, we banded together as a nation. We were unified in common tragedy, against a common enemy, and that bond of togetherness was beautiful. Over the ensuing years, however, it’s become apparent that we lost more that day than just the unique and precious lives of the victims, more than our feeling of safety and security. We’ve lost our sense of wonder, of hope, of seeing possibility in even our bleakest days and working to make those possibilities come to fruition. We’ve become cynical.

That’s the message I hope to impart in my writing. I hope to give hope, to share the small wonders of just being alive, for it is a miraculous thing. We aren’t bonded together as one nation because of a horrific attack; we aren’t bonded together as a species because we’re all human. We are bonded together on this singular planet, humans and animals and plants alike, because we are ALIVE.

So, never forget, and honor the fallen, but release the pain, the negativity, the fear. Open yourself up to imagining again, embrace possibility. Seek out castles in the sky. We have but one life to live…how do you choose to live yours?