> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.simplesolutionshardproblems.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Anchors - URL: https://www.simplesolutionshardproblems.com/essays/anchors/ - Published: 2026-09-11T12:00:10.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-11T12:00:11.000Z - Description: Twenty-five years after September 11. Twenty-nine floors up. Fifty-four people waiting on me. What anchors do you reach for when the world turns upside down? - Author: Lara Catledge Reedick - Tags: Catholic Faith, Memory, Spiritual Formation, Resilience Every September 11, even twenty-five years later, I hold my breath. On that September morning I was driving to work on I-285, coming up on the 400 exit. Rhubarb Jones broke into the music on Eagle 106.7 to say a plane had just flown into a skyscraper in New York City and that it was going to be a long day. If I think about it hard enough I can likely remember the song that was playing. At that moment, no one knew there were multiple planes with multiple targets. My office in Atlanta, Tower Place, was on the top floor, twenty-nine stories up. We had floor-to-ceiling windows all around and the whole floor to ourselves, an unobstructed view from Stone Mountain to downtown Atlanta. Between parking my car and getting off the elevator, the second plane hit the second tower. Every major news website in the country was flooded and would not load. A woman in our QA group was Turkish, and she got through to a news site in Turkey and started translating out loud as the news—such as it was—came in. That was our information. One person reading a foreign website to a group of people huddled around her cubicle. I don’t remember when I understood it was an attack. There was no word from anyone official yet. Somebody floated a failure in New York air traffic control, because a plane had hit a skyscraper in fog once before and that was the only shape anyone had for it. It looked like this. It couldn’t be this. Could it? Once we understood it was a coordinated terrorist attack, the question changed. What’s next? Were we on the target list? Tower Place was tall and it was full and it was a short drive from the busiest airport in the world. It was also not the most likely thing in Atlanta to hit, but we considered it. Our company provided phone service to customers nationwide, including customers in New York City. I was the most senior person on site that morning. I was thirty-one years old. Our phones were down. My boss was in Tampa and I could not reach him. Cell phones were available but not common. Fifty-four co-workers were waiting for me to make a decision as to whether we were staying in the office or going home. Fifty-four people in an office, and their parents, and their children, balanced against people in New York City trying to reach each other, and whoever would dial 911 in the next hour and need the line to work. I kept everyone at their desks. I thought about splitting the staff—deciding who has to stay, who can go—and I didn’t do it, because I had no idea what the day would require or who I would need. I hope I told people they could leave if they had to. I don’t remember. Most of us were in our twenties and thirties and there were parents among us. Then I held my breath for hours hoping that I had made the right choice. --- Everyone went home that night. --- Last month a friend borrowed my car. As he reached for the seatbelt, the shoulder strap fell into his lap. Not the buckle. The whole seatbelt. The hardware that held the anchor to the frame had worked itself loose. I had been driving that car for months. Every time I buckled up, I assumed I was protected. The belt looked perfectly normal. It took someone else sitting in the passenger seat for the problem to show itself. The seatbelt wasn’t broken. The anchor was still there. The hardware that secured it wasn’t holding. Nothing had happened to me in all those months. I read about something Emory psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush had been doing during the summer of 2001\. They’d asked four dozen families how much the children knew about their own history—where the grandparents grew up, what had gone wrong and when. Two months later was September 11, and every child in the study lived through the same morning at the same time. When the researchers went back, the children who came through it best were the ones who knew the most about their families. I encountered the story in Bruce Feiler’s *The Secrets of Happy Families*, which includes Duke’s account of why. There were many different versions of the family history. One was a story of steady rise, one of steady decline. The family story that aligned to the children who adapted most readily was one Duke calls an oscillating narrative. We’ve had good years and hard ones. We’ve made mistakes. Through it all we stayed together. An anchor isn’t optimism. It’s knowing to whom you belong. The stories we tell ourselves matter. In the practice called the Daily Examen, you ask yourself where in the day you found the presence or absence of God. The Eleventh Step of the Twelve asks me to regularly seek conscious contact with my Higher Power. Neither is an audit. Both turn attention to the same place, and both are done daily, often enough that it becomes a habit, often enough that it is available to you when there is nothing left to consult. I taught my daughters the sign of the cross as four stops, a mnemonic so they’d remember which way it goes. The gesture in and of itself is a prayer. You don’t need the words. Head. Heart. Wallet. Watch. Where are my thoughts focused? Who tells me who I am? What am I trusting more than God? What story does my calendar tell? I used to think of that as devotion. I think of it now as a status check, and as rehearsal. That September morning there was no one available to tell me I was making the right choice. And no one else to make it. I made the decision anyway and in making it I thought about what I owed to whom. As for the car, I tightened the bolt before I drove it again. It was a five-minute repair. The difficult part wasn’t tightening it. The difficult part was realizing I didn’t know it wasn’t holding me. --- **P.S.** If you want to know what else happened that day: *Come From Away* is on Apple TV. It’s the filmed Broadway production—Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s musical about the thirty-eight planes and 6,579 passengers ordered out of the sky and set down in Gander, Newfoundland, a town whose population doubled overnight and fed everyone anyway. They filmed it at the Schoenfeld in 2021, in front of an audience that included survivors and first responders. It’s under two hours, and behind an Apple TV subscription. The licensing opened to regional and community theatres last year, so it’s being staged all over the country this fall. Ford’s Theatre in Washington is running it through October 18\. There’s a reasonable chance one is playing within driving distance of you. And it’s playing in Gander itself, at the Joseph R. Smallwood Arts and Culture Centre on Airport Boulevard, where it has run every summer for four years. This season closes Sunday. They added a matinee on the twelfth.