I can do anything. I watch the smoke curl into the night sky as the blinding lights signal the loss of life. Nothing is impossible. I see a girl on TV my age who was abducted after being separated from her friends. I am invincible. Whenever I am alone, I have to look behind my back every second just to make sure. You can reach for the stars. At least, that’s what they tell us before they get to explaining the dangers, problems, and monsters that we will face in the world. Anything is possible if you just believe. But your beliefs will not stop anything bad from happening to you.

As we grow up, infallibility is one of the greatest contradictions we are challenged by. You can do everything but nothing. You are an adult but still a child. Go out and try new things but not anything that can put you in any danger. This dichotomy often leaves us even more confused than we already were. I can do everything, but I can also do nothing. I am an adult, but only a child. To avoid this contradiction, we fully commit ourselves to infallibility by trying anything and everything we can. While this fake sense of infallibility allows many to push their limits, it also leads to many unfeeling and careless actions. One of my friends complains about a follower on Instagram as I glance out the window to see the flashing lights fall on the crushed metal and dreams of two other people just trying to go home like us. We allow ourselves to assume that our lives will continue for the next second, minute, hour, day, and year. Going through our planned out days and weekends allows each of us to detach from any event that distracts us from our goals.

But maybe everyone needs this wake-up call — not just the crazy teens or kids beginning to explore the world, but also the adults going through each boring day of work without appreciating what they have. Keep improving and striving for better, but realize that tomorrow may not come, and each day is a day to reinvent or restart the path and life you have chosen for yourself. So take the infallibility with a grain of salt. Live with an infallible sense of fallibility.