Our lives are busy. Each day comes and goes, blurring into weeks and months, making it easy to forget to take a moment to pay our respects to the 2,996 fine men and women who lost their lives on this day, 17 years ago.  See this as a reminder, and designate a second to acknowledge the weight this date carries.

September 11th was a tragedy of an incomprehensible scale as the senseless attacks were not inflicted solely on the United States, but also on humanity as a whole.  In our society, we have a tendency to fixate on what divides us. Differences of opinion, conflicting cultures, belief systems, even the color of our skin are used to separate us, cause conflict and wars, and continuously move us farther away from the bigger picture.  Let this day show you the irrelevance of such details; let it symbolize our likeness to one another as a nation, and furthermore, as members of the human race.  We all feel pain, and more importantly we all want our lives to be filled with love, joy, and success.

Today, take a second to reevaluate the time we spend on earth, and the energy we project in our daily lives.  Get to know one another, learn to accept and respect our differing qualities, and recognize that which unites us.  We are more alike than you might initially think us to be.

Featured image: Photo by Michael Casey (April, 1988) from creativecommons.org

Photo by Sawyer Sutton (December, 2017) from pexels.com