Anchor Family Quotes

To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots - religion, nation, community, family, or profession - are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust. It is no longer resources that limit decisions, it is the decision that makes the resources.

We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive.

Mother was anchor. Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean. Some boats eventually floated ashore. And some boats, like me, seemed to float farther and farther from land.

Be strong. Even when you can't be.

A child is both an anchor and a set of wings. My old way of doing things was gone.

We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive. I’ve been lifting anchors since I was eighteen. I’ve been holding my breath since before I was born.

Family is the only anchor that will hold in a choppy sea.

The Voyager We are all lonely voyagers sailing on life's ebb tide, To a far off place were all stripling warriors have died, Sometime at eve when the tide is low, The voices call us back to the rippling water's flow, Even though our boat sailed with love in our hearts, Neither our dreams or plans would keep heaven far apart, We drift through the hush of God's twilight pale, With no response to our friendly hail, We raise our sails and search for majestic light, While finding company on this journey to the brighten our night, Then suddenly he pulls us through the reef's cutting sea, Back to the place that he asked us to be, Friendly barges that were anchored so sweetly near, In silent sorrow they drop their salted tears, Shall our soul be a feast of kelp and brine, The wasted tales of wishful time, Are we a fish on a line lured with bait, Is life the grind, a heartless fate, Suddenly, "HUSH", said the wind from afar, Have you not looked to the heavens and seen the new star, It danced on the abyss of the evening sky, The sparkle of heaven shining on high, Its whisper echoed on the ocean's spray, From the bow to the mast they heard him say, "Hope is above, not found in the deep, I am alive in your memories and dreams when you sleep, I will greet you at sunset and with the moon's evening smile, I will light your path home.. every last lonely mile, My friends, have no fear, my work was done well, In this life I broke the waves and rode the swell, I found faith in those that I called my crew, My love will be the compass that will see you through, So don't look for me on the ocean's floor to find, I've never left the weathered docks of your loving mind, For I am in the moon, the wind and the whale's evening song, I am the sailor of eternity whose voyage is not gone.

Love is an anchor -- it stops you from drifting away. Love is sticking up for your friends and family, or even your pets. Love is being brave and saying what you feel. Love is making music or playing tennis; it's doing what you want to do. Love is holding on and not letting go.

Homes should be an anchor, a safe harbor, a place of refuge, a place where families dwell together, a place where children are loved. In the home, parents should teach their children the great lessons of life. Home should be the center of one’s earthly experience, where love and mutual respect are appropriately blended.

A child is both an anchor and a set of wings.

Our schools will not improve if we continue to focus only on reading and mathematics while ignoring the other studies that are essential elements of a good education. Schools that expect nothing more of their students than mastery of basic skills will not produce graduates who are ready for college or the modern workplace. *** Our schools will not improve if we value only what tests measure. The tests we have now provide useful information about students' progress in reading and mathematics, but they cannot measure what matters most in education....What is tested may ultimately be less important that what is untested... *** Our schools will not improve if we continue to close neighborhood schools in the name of reform. Neighborhood schools are often the anchors of their communities, a steady presence that helps to cement the bond of community among neighbors. *** Our schools cannot improve if charter schools siphon away the most motivated students and their families in the poorest communities from the regular public schools. *** Our schools will not improve if we continue to drive away experienced principals and replace them with neophytes who have taken a leadership training course but have little or no experience as teachers. *** Our schools cannot be improved if we ignore the disadvantages associated with poverty that affect children's ability to learn. Children who have grown up in poverty need extra resources, including preschool and medical care.

Star salt (the stars’ reflection in a river) Sun cradle (the sea) Lemon kiss (everyone knew exactly what this meant!) Family anchor (the dinner table) Heart notcher (your first lover) Veil of time (you spin around in the sandpit to find you are old and wet your pants when you laugh) Dreamside Wishableness This last word was Samy’s new favorite. “We all live in wishableness,” she said. “Each in a different kind.

It reminded me that they [the students] were more than just their scholarly shortcomings and gripes about the workload. Each had a history, a set of problems. Each, for better or worse, was anchored to a family.

Losing Sarah and my boy was the hardest thing I've ever lived through. But even then, you see, I knew that Eleanor was with me. If not here, then at least in the world, where I could find her. I could think of her living in that old house with her father, I could write to her if I chose. She was the anchor in my world, no matter how far I was from her. But if I lose her... Ian, I lose myself. I can't live. Not without Eleanor.

It's not only the family you have that makes you who you are but also the family you make. Often it's the latter who helps you catch the wind on sunny days and who anchors you when seas get rough.

On the postcard Perdu wrote Catherine that night were the phrases Max had invented that afternoon so he could present them to Samy at dinner. Samy found them so beautiful that she kept repeating them to herself, rolling their sounds back and forth on her tongue like a crumb of cake. Star salt (the stars' reflection in a river) Sun cradle (the sea) Lemon kiss (everyone knew exactly what this meant!) Family anchor (the dinner table) Heart notcher (your first lover) Veil of time (you spin around in the sandpit to find you are old and wet your pants when you laugh) Dreamside Wishableness

Dr. Bar David?” A young man with black eyes and curly hair came toward him. Carrying a digital recorder. He looked familiar. “Richard Falco, North Richardson High. I took algebra and Calc I from you.” “Oh, yes, of course. Good to see you.” “I’m now reporting for Anchor Media. Just started a couple of months ago.” David started walking away. “Good for you. What a good course of action.” “Listen, I need to get a couple of quotes anyway. I wonder if—Oh, wait! I’m so sorry. You were at the North Richardson school shooting, five years ago.” David nodded. And began to panic. “That’s why you’re here, right?” the stupid student asked. “Protesting gun laws?” “I really need to be going, now. Good luck with your interviews.” Hyperventilating. Richard grabbed David’s shoulder. “But Dr. Bar David. Your story, tragic as it is, ends up being the reason for this whole public gun melting, right? A few words from you about—” David lost it. “Listen! My whole life changed that day. When that meshugener killed my entire family, my wife and my son, in an instant! With a gun he purchased the week before!” David grabbed the kid’s throat. “I do not want to talk about it. Don’t mention me in your article. I will sue you! Leave me alone.” Richard swallowed and nodded, fast. “Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry—” David started shouting, “The bullets! The bullets! The bullets!” His head pounded. His ears roared.

New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.

Through all the fast-paced changes occurring around us, we earnestly pray and work to ensure that the values of the gospel of Jesus Christ endure. Already some of them are in jeopardy of being lost. At the top of the list of these values and, therefore, prime targets of the adversary, are the sanctity of marriage and the central importance of families. They provide an anchor and the safe harbor of a home.

To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. He must search out totally new ways to anchor himself, for all the old roots—religion, nation, community, family, or profession— are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust. Before he can do so, however, he must understand in greater detail how the effects of acceleration penetrate his personal life, creep into his behavior and alter the quality of existence. He must, in other words, understand transience.

Rather than anchoring our hope beyond the struggle, always projecting ahead, perhaps locating joy within the struggle through our full presence can be our essential gesture at this moment in time. To feel the pain of now and not look away. To act not with the hope of moving forward, always forward, but to see the wisdom of stepping sideways as we create a different space, a more conscious space in the direction of pause, where we can breathe and gather ourselves so we can gather others around us and create a community of care, even within our own families, especially within our own families.

The moms and dads and grandparents didn’t wear suits like the lawyers and judge. They wore sweatpants and stretchy pants and T-shirts. Their hair was a bit frizzy. And it was the first time I noticed “TV accents”—the neutral accent that so many news anchors had. The social workers and the judge and the lawyer all had TV accents. None of us did. The people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not.

He was lonely. He wanted his own family. A wife. Children. Someone to come home to. Someone to care for, to take care of. He needed a purpose. His lifestyle had no balance. He needed someone to become his center, to anchor him.

THE FAIR HAD A POWERFUL and lasting impact on the nation’s psyche, in ways both large and small. Walt Disney’s father, Elias, helped build the White City; Walt’s Magic Kingdom may well be a descendant. Certainly the fair made a powerful impression on the Disney family. It proved such a financial boon that when the family’s third son was born that year, Elias in gratitude wanted to name him Columbus. His wife, Flora, intervened; the baby became Roy. Walt came next, on December 5, 1901. The writer L. Frank Baum and his artist-partner William Wallace Denslow visited the fair; its grandeur informed their creation of Oz. The Japanese temple on the Wooded Island charmed Frank Lloyd Wright, and may have influenced the evolution of his “Prairie” residential designs. The fair prompted President Harrison to designate October 12 a national holiday, Columbus Day, which today serves to anchor a few thousand parades and a three-day weekend. Every carnival since 1893 has included a Midway and a Ferris Wheel, and every grocery store contains products born at the exposition. Shredded Wheat did survive. Every house has scores of incandescent bulbs powered by alternating current, both of which first proved themselves worthy of large-scale use at the fair; and nearly every town of any size has its little bit of ancient Rome, some beloved and be-columned bank, library or post office. Covered with graffiti, perhaps, or even an ill-conceived coat of paint, but underneath it all the glow of the White City persists. Even the Lincoln Memorial in Washington can trace its heritage to the fair.

Time passed in brewing tea, the odd remark, cigarettes, then dawn came up. The widening light caught the plumage of quails and partridges...and quickly I dropped this wonderful moment to the bottom of my memory, like a sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again.You stretch, pace to and fro feeling weightless, and the word 'happiness' seems too thin and limited to describe what has happened. In the end, the bedrock of experience is not made up of the family, or work, of what others say or think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.

Stop.” His hands framed her face, anchoring her, refusing to let her look away. His eyes blazed. “Don’t believe those lies, Arabelle. Not for a second. You are everything. Everything. Everything good, everything bright. Everything worthwhile.

One afternoon in the fall of 2015, while I was writing this book, I was driving in my car and listening to SiriusXM Radio. On the folk music station the Coffee House, a song came on with a verse that directly spoke to me—so much so that I pulled off the road as soon as I could and wrote down the lyrics and the singer’s name. The song was called “The Eye,” and it’s written by the country-folk singer Brandi Carlile and her bandmate Tim Hanseroth and sung by Carlile. I wish it could play every time you open these pages, like a Hallmark birthday card, because it’s become the theme song of this book. The main refrain is: I wrapped your love around me like a chain But I never was afraid that it would die You can dance in a hurricane But only if you’re standing in the eye. I hope that it is clear by now that every day going forward we’re going to be asked to dance in a hurricane, set off by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law. Some politicians propose to build a wall against this hurricane. That is a fool’s errand. There is only one way to thrive now, and it’s by finding and creating your own eye. The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It is both dynamic and stable—and so must we be. We can’t escape these accelerations. We have to dive into them, take advantage of their energy and flows where possible, move with them, use them to learn faster, design smarter, and collaborate deeper—all so we can build our own eyes to anchor and propel ourselves and our families confidently forward.

Yes I do give unlimited chances. Nevertheless, every chance dented weakens the bond. Eventually, this ship will sail, subtly. Intense grip on or extended period with the anchor will prove futile—and are frankly inconsequential as I don’t look back—a weakened bond is unfortunately all there is.

The feel of my mother’s warmth behind me as she read is one of the first things I can remember—the safe anchor of her body and the music of her read-aloud voice the ocean on which my small consciousness sailed into power through stories of music and brave maidens, feasts and castles, family and home.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

Tremors hit, quaking her hard enough for him to feel them. He wrapped his arms around her and bent his face close to hers. He might not understand what was going on in her head, but a mighty squall was battering her hull, and if he couldn't figure out how to shelter her from it, he aimed to be her anchor until it passed.

What Hunter Biden, the son of America’s vice president, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (later to be secretary of state) were creating was an international private equity firm. It was anchored by the Heinz family alternative investment fund, Rosemont Capital.

Being awakened by God’s pain-megaphone redirects our focus to essential things worth preserving and nurturing: relationship with family and friends, rhythms and practices leading to health, humble service toward our work, our churches, and our neighbors, and above all, anchoring our roots in the character, promises, and future of God.

My mother showed her gratitude for her life in exile by alluding to India’s modernity: the expansive railway network; the Bollywood movies she came to love for their tumultuous stories which ultimately conceded to the cardinal guidelines she held in her own life- love, family and duty. Still, it was Tibet’s antiquity that anchored her in exile. It was phayul she longed for when her skin was scorched by the summer heat of India’s plains. When she drank milk she compared it to the milk of her childhood for such sweetness and creaminess was not easily forgotten, and when she felt nauseous riding the buses that weaved their way around curvaceous mountain roads she spoke of the horses she had loved to ride.

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since. I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since. But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen. As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal. But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. I mean, what does a child know about faith? It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. I was devastated. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. ‘Please, God, comfort me.’ Blow me down … He did. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life. This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree. I had found a calling for my life.

If the fig tree didn’t blossom and there was no fruit on the vine, there would be no food to eat. If the olives failed, the fields were granite, the flocks were decimated, and there wasn’t a single ox in the barn, he and his family would die a slow, hungry death. But even the prospect of these bleak circumstances couldn’t break Habakkuk’s joy. Why? Because his joy wasn’t anchored in prosperity but in the God of his salvation.

For Zuk and the other woman boycotters, this endeavor was not about escaping the confines of being working class, but about protecting the rights of the working class. What this strategy innately relies on is the foremost recognition that poor and working-class people have and deserve rights in the first place—and aren’t plagues on society who are lazy, unwilling to apply themselves, or should, through some elaborate matrix and suspension of systemic blockades, simply not be working class. Existing in this socioeconomic bracket with these intrinsic financial realities was a legitimate life, across their families as well as their neighbors. And this communal approach to understanding their needs and successes was anchored deeply in protecting food prices for everyone rather than reverse engineering their individual lives to accommodate the price hike.

The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” Tea anchored the day—though at teatime, Churchill himself did not actually drink it, despite reputedly having said that tea was more important than ammunition. He preferred whiskey and water. Tea was comfort and history; above all, it was English. As long as there was tea, there was England. But now the war and the strict rationing that came with it threatened to shake even this most prosaic of pillars.

pure-hearted old man, and were both rebuked and saved; gifted men found a companion in him; ambitious men caught glimpses of nobler ambitions than their own; and even worldlings confessed that his beliefs were beautiful and true, although ‘they wouldn’t pay’. To outsiders, the five energetic women seemed to rule the house, and so they did in many things; but the quiet scholar, sitting among his books, was still the head of the family, the household conscience, anchor, and comforter; for to him the busy, anxious women always turned in troublous times, finding him, in the truest sense of those sacred words, husband and father. The girls gave their hearts into their mother’s keeping, their souls into their father’s; and to both parents, who lived and laboured so faithfully for them, they gave a love that grew with their growth, and bound them tenderly together by the sweetest tie which blesses life

The abuse experience might have made her suspicious of anyone wanting to help and support her. Her abusive partner probably twisted the concept of trust in such a way as to shatter her willingness to trust others. It might be hard for her to fathom that an anchor has no agenda except to care about her. However, it is the very process of learning to trust her anchor which can help an abused woman. Through that relationship she can be reminded what real trust is, who is trustworthy, and how to trust someone again or for the first time.

It’ll be strange being so far from Mexico.” “Having second thoughts?” She peeled off the nightgown and put on the trousers. He was looking at her. “No,” he said simply. “I don’t have no one here.” I don't have anyone either, she thought. Perhaps that was why she’d let herself be swept into this. He hadn’t seduced her, not by far, but she’d been seduced anyway by the thoughts of comfort and companionship. Her family was gone, her home razed. She must scrub herself of her name, her identity, her very self. She had a need for an anchor, a friendly face. Weak, she thought. You are no warrior, never will be.

The sultan had enormous eyebrows, fibrous like angora wool. In moments of strife, his eyebrows twitched violently. Like now! His Excellency’s royal blood boiled. Once again another mesmerized American news anchor gushed about Dubai’s vision, hailing the imagination of the al-Maktoum family. “Where is this vision coming from?” probed Katie Couric. “Ignorant Yankee!” Sultan Mo-Mo’s British twang bore traces of Basil Fawlty. The sultan wanted to retch. Dubai’s showboating gave him indigestion, but he continued helping himself to more chips and fiery salsa, downing cold Guinness, smoking excellent hash, humming the theme song of The Wonder Years.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this phenomenon in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real,” he writes. “The frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.” This time travel into the future—otherwise known as anticipation—accounts for a big chunk of the happiness gleaned from any event. As you look forward to something good that is about to happen, you experience some of the same joy you would in the moment. The major difference is that the joy can last much longer. Consider that ritual of opening presents on Christmas morning. The reality of it seldom takes more than an hour, but the anticipation of seeing the presents under the tree can stretch out the joy for weeks. One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn’t take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost. It didn’t come after the vacations, with tourists bathing in their post-trip glow. It didn’t even come through that strongly during the trips, as the joy of travel mingled with the stress of travel: jet lag, stomach woes, and train conductors giving garbled instructions over the loudspeaker. The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions. A vision of little umbrella-sporting drinks can create the happiness rush of a mini vacation even in the midst of a rainy commute. On some level, people instinctively know this. In one study that Gilbert writes about, people were told they’d won a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When asked when they’d like to schedule the dinner, most people didn’t want to head over right then. They wanted to wait, on average, over a week—to savor the anticipation of their fine fare and to optimize their pleasure. The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick. Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because—even if all goes wrong in the moment—you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation. I love spontaneity and embrace it when it happens, but I cannot bank my pleasure solely on it. If you wait until Saturday morning to make your plans for the weekend, you will spend a chunk of your Saturday working on such plans, rather than anticipating your fun. Hitting the weekend without a plan means you may not get to do what you want. You’ll use up energy in negotiations with other family members. You’ll start late and the museum will close when you’ve only been there an hour. Your favorite restaurant will be booked up—and even if, miraculously, you score a table, think of how much more you would have enjoyed the last few days knowing that you’d be eating those seared scallops on Saturday night!

Because hypermobility is typically correlated with career-oriented lifestyles and job demands, one or both parents in mobile families tend to work long hours and so are less available to their children. Having few enough constants in their environment to provide ballast for development, mobility adds another disruptive force—the world turns into a menagerie of changing places and faces. Such children may grow up bored and lonely, looking for constant stimulation. Continually forced to adapt to new situations and people, they may lose the stable sense of self encouraged by secure community anchors. Though socially graceful, like Lisa they typically feel they are gracefully faking it.

The behavior “anchor baby” refers to is the fraud of illegal aliens giving birth at U.S. hospitals, thus anchoring an entire extended family to the United States by virtue of the child’s auto-citizenship. There’s no logical reason for the whole family to come here, but we get wails of You’re trying to separate us from our American citizen child! No one ever considers the possibility that the family could also stay together by going back to their own country. This is the way immigration law is abused with “family reunification” policies, also known as “chain migration”—or as the Times would put it, “a derisive term” to describe remote villages relocating to America on the basis of a single villager’s U.S. citizenship.

Something Rich and Strange She takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I'll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she has passed the Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won' t hit her head on a rock and for the first time she's afraid and she's suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep from it as the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into the whiteness and she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and the water holds her there and she tells herself don't breathe but the need rises inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through her chest and throat and as that need reaches her mouth her mouth and nose open and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room, the smell of chalk dust that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final, beautiful thought - that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism's colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.

True blues ain't no new news about who's been abused For the blues is as old as my stolen soul I sang the blues when the missionaries came Passing out bibles in Jesus' name I sang the blues in the hull of the ship Beneath the sting of the slavemaster's whip I sang the blues when the ship anchored the dark My family being sold on a slave block I sang the blues being torn from my first born And hung my head and cried when my wife took his life And then committed suicide. I sang the blues on the slavemaster's plantation helping Him build his free nation I sang the blues in the cottonfield, hustlin' to make the daily yield I sang the blues when he forced my woman to beg Lord knows how I wished he was dead I sang the blues on the run, ducking the dogs and dodging the gun I sang the blues hanging from the tree in a desperate attempt to break free I sang the blues when the sun went down, cursing the master when he wasn't around I sang the blues in all these wars dying for some unknown cause I sang the blues in a high tone, low moan, loud groan, soft grunt, hard funk I sang the blues in land sea and air, about who when why and where I sang the blues in church on sunday, slaving on monday, misused on tuesday, abused on wednesday, accused on thursday, fried alive on friday, and died on saturday. Sho nuff singing the blues I sang the blues in the summer, fall winter and spring I know sho nuff the blues is my thing I sang the backwater blues, rhythm and blues, gospel blues, saint louis blues, crosstown blues, chicago blues, mississippi GODDAMN blues, the watts blues, the harlem blues, hoe blues, gut-bucket blues, funky chunky blues, i sang the up north cigarette corp blues, the down south sprung out the side of my mouth blues, I sang the blues black, i sang the blues blacker, i sang the blues blackest I SANG BOUT MY SHO NUFF BLUE BLACKNESS! from "True Blues" by the Last Poets

But without Emily, Greg would feel—paradoxically for such a social creature—alone. Before they met, most of Greg’s girlfriends were extroverts. He says he enjoyed those relationships, but never got to know his girlfriends well, because they were always “plotting how to be with groups of people.” He speaks of Emily with a kind of awe, as if she has access to a deeper state of being. He also describes her as “the anchor” around which his world revolves. Emily, for her part, treasures Greg’s ebullient nature; he makes her feel happy and alive. She has always been attracted to extroverts, who she says “do all the work of making conversation. For them, it’s not work at all.” The trouble is that for most of the five years they’ve been together, Greg and Emily have been having one version or another of the same fight. Greg, a music promoter with a large circle of friends, wants to host dinner parties every Friday—casual, animated get-togethers with heaping bowls of pasta and flowing bottles of wine. He’s been giving Friday-night dinners since he was a senior in college, and they’ve become a highlight of his week and a treasured piece of his identity. Emily has come to dread these weekly events. A hardworking staff attorney for an art museum and a very private person, the last thing she wants to do when she gets home from work is entertain. Her idea of a perfect start to the weekend is a quiet evening at the movies, just her and Greg. It seems an irreconcilable difference: Greg wants fifty-two dinner parties a year, Emily wants zero. Greg says that Emily should make more of an effort. He accuses her of being antisocial. “I am social,” she says. “I love you, I love my family, I love my close friends. I just don’t love dinner parties. People don’t really relate at those parties—they just socialize. You’re lucky because I devote all my energy to you. You spread yours around to everyone.” But Emily soon backs off, partly because she hates fighting, but also because she doubts herself. Maybe I am antisocial, she

The identification we feel towards the places where we live or were born can give us an anchor in a chaotic world and strengthen our connections to family, community, and the generations that preceded and will follow us. At their best, such feelings are a celebration of culture and all that comes with it in the form of literature, language, music, food, folktales, and even the wildlife we associate with our homelands--the eagle in America, for instance, or in the Czech Republic what's left of our lions, wolves, and bears. There is, however, a tipping point, where loyalty to one's own tribe curdles into resentment and hatred, then aggression towards others. That's when Fascism enters the picture, trailed by an assortment of woes, up to and including the Holocaust and global war. Because of that history, postwar statesmen established organizations to make it harder for deluded nationalists to trample on the rights of neighbors. These bodies include the United Nations--hence Truman's speech--and regional institutions in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

My father strode up and cleared his throat. “Oh, hello, Mr. Martin,” Seth said. “Hello,” my father said. They shook hands. “Charlotte, your mom and I want to discuss something with you, but I don’t think it’s a good time now. I think you need some rest.” “Oh Jesus, what now?” I said. “Charlotte!” my mother scolded. “I’m drunk, you guys. It’s not a big deal.” Seth anchored me to his side by wrapping an arm around my waist. My mother stuck her hand out to Seth. “Hello, Seth, I’m Charlotte’s mom, Laura.” She blushed. “Oh, Motherrr, are you blushing? He’s just a professional baseball plaaayer with twelve-pack abs and perfect hair, get over it!” “Let’s go, drunky.” Seth pulled me along. “Hey, Taylor,” my father said, calling Seth by his last name. We turned back to see my dad point to his own eyes and then to Seth’s. I’m watching you, he mouthed, and then he buckled over and started laughing. “Your family is totally weird,” Seth said into my ear. “I see where you get your sense of humor.” “Yep, they’re all right. By the way, it’s your fault I’m drunk.” I caught Helen’s eye as we left the bar. Seth waved, she smiled, and Roddy laughed. “I think you had a little too much before I got involved.” “I told you that. Hey, wanna go skinny-dipping?” “I’m getting you a sandwich and then I’m putting you to bed,” he said. “Killjoy.

But she had learned about love through books, knew enough of it to recognize its absence in her life. Everywhere she looked, she was blinded by other forms of love, as if God were taunting her. From her bedroom window, she’d watch mothers pushing strollers, or children hanging from their father’s shoulders, or lovers holding hands. At doctors’ offices, she’d flip through magazines to find families smiling wildly, couples embracing, even women photographed alone, their bright faces shining with self-love. When she’d watch soap operas with her grandmother, love was the anchor, the glue that seemingly held the whole world together. And when she flipped through American channels when her grandparents weren’t looking, again love was the center of every show, while she, Deya, was left dangling on her own, longing for something other than her sisters to hold on to. As much as she loved them, it never felt like enough. But what did love even mean? Love was Isra staring dully out the window, refusing to look at her; love was Adam barely home; love was Fareeda’s endless attempts to marry her off, to rid herself of a burden; love was a family who never visited, not even on holidays. And maybe that was her problem. Maybe that’s why she always felt disconnected from her classmates, why she couldn’t see the world the way they did, couldn’t believe in their version of love. It was because they had mothers and fathers who wanted them, because they were coddled in a blanket of familial love, because they had never celebrated a birthday alone. It was because they had cried in someone’s arms after a bad day, had known the comforts of the words “I love you” growing up. It was because they’d been loved in their lives that they believed in love, saw it surely for themselves in their futures, even in places it clearly wasn’t.

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

THIS BOOK is about the reproduction of social advantage and disadvantage across generations in the experience of typical Baltimore youth, anchored in their childhood and extending into their late twenties. For most, their socioeconomic status as adults is about what it was when they were children, but their sense of their lives today is not simply a matter of how far they have gone through school or their workplace success. For disadvantaged youth growing up in a city with one of the nation's highest homicide rates (The Atlantic 2011), the clichéd “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” is not to be taken for granted.

Family ...! Near or far distance matters not. Though we argue and fight does not change the fact love is always given without reserve. We might not speak often, truth be told we might not even see eye to eye. This does not diminish or change the love given and shared.   Though loss and change in life will happen hold onto the love. Let it be your anchor let it be your light. As a guiding light it will show the way forward during dark times. The anchor to hold you fast during troubled and stormy times. Hold on to each other in heart, mind and love. Distance will then disappear.

The inevitable result of borrowed faith is lost faith. People born into a family anchored in Christendom tend to assume they’re right with God, regardless of whether they personally turn from sin and trust in Jesus.

Your words are an extension of your thoughts, and your thoughts form your belief systems. Your beliefs are a very big aspect of who you are, what you do, the quality of life you live, and the people you surround yourself with. Really, any and every thing in your life is an extension of your thoughts or belief systems. Your belief systems then usually become a standard or set of rules in which you govern your life and daily actions. This, in turn, creates your physical experience and your perception of reality. The result is usually an opinion or perception that defines in your mind who you are. It is your story about your life, your identity. You become what you choose. Other people also influence you in different ways and to varying degrees, but ultimately you are the one who anchors a belief to yourself. However, most of us did not deliberately create our beliefs. We just picked them up along the way. There are all kinds of outside influences to mold and shape your belief systems. The media, your friends, your family, your religion, the books you read, and advertising are just a few things that influence you every day.

The Time Line is great for getting things into perspective when you feel a bit lost and lacking direction or if you have a big change coming up such as moving to secondary school, your parents splitting up or having a new family arrangement. When you experience grief or loss, whether that is for a person or a part of your life such as leaving your Primary School, you can travel back along the time line, identify which skills you need from your old life, anchor them and bring them into the present as you move forward to Secondary School. Once you’ve done the Time Line a few times it will be in your head and you can conjure up the image and the steps without moving. This can be useful in situations when you can’t actually move physically, in class for instance.

If you’re a Christian, here’s the good news: who you really are has nothing to do with you—how much you can accomplish, who you can become, your behavior, your strengths, your weaknesses, your sordid past, your family background, your education, your looks, and so on. Your identity is firmly anchored in Christ’s accomplishment, not yours; His strength, not yours; His performance, not yours; His victory, not yours.

Sometimes such hopelessness cannot be described in words. My blood pressure rises in frustration. The mind becomes infected with sadness. Life is a boat without oars. Where we will drop anchor nobody knows. After years of drifting abroad to make the family happy, some will never get satisfaction themselves. Neither is the family pleased. Sometimes it's surreal to watch, an empty book of sighs. If the unwanted pain makes us cry, there's no echo because it's emptiness everywhere. There are no perfect walls, so the scream goes and goes and never comes back. I feel like a stranger to myself. Once again, we start over the daily grind.

my family would anchor me here, that I was obligated to play a role in their drama. I don’t think I ever realized that I’m not trapped by their choices, any more than they’re trapped by mine.

Family "Life is extremely unpredictable and has this funny way of springing surprises; sometimes kind or otherwise. We can survive if we have our anchors strongly pivoted and buried deep; our Family and Friends. Don't forget to spend time with them.

The Last Street of Tehean Facing the airport, all that's now left in my grasp is a crumpled land that fits in the palm of my hand. Facing wavering sunbeams— a sun that is angry and mute. All the way from the salt sands of Dasht-e Lut, it came, the dream that forced my fingers' shift, that set my teeth on edge. A muted breeze, whirlwind spun from sand dunes all the way, even through the back alley. Are you pasting together the cut-up fragments of my face to make me laugh? No longer than the palm of the hand, a short leap, exactly the length you had predicted. A huge grave in which to lay the longest night of the year to sleep. Sleep has quit our eyelids for other pastures, has dropped its anchor at the shores of garden ponds, has lost the chapped flaking of its lips, poor thing! Are you pasting together the cut-up fragments of my face to make me laugh? With scissors - snip, snip - they are severing something. The alphabet shavings strewn on the ground, are they the letters that spell our family name? With every zig-zag, you cage my mother's breath, her footprints fading in the shifting sands. Are you pasting together the cut-up fragments of my face to make me laugh? No. A strange land-shape form. I will not return. I left behind a shoe, one of a pair, for you to put on and follow after me. Translated from Persian to English by Franklin Lewis

Frederick Douglass, the Christian abolitionist, orator, and writer, understood this quite well. In a lecture in Rochester, New York, he said, “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”17 That quote may seem trite until you understand the context in which Douglass said it. He was explaining that he would partner with the American Anti-Slavery Society to abolish slavery, but he would not partner in their effort to abolish the American government as a whole. They believed the US Constitution was a slaveholding document and that they needed to abolish the Union itself for the sake of emancipation. Douglass disagreed. He understood the flaws in the US Constitution and the blind spots of the founders, but he believed the Constitution opened the door and provided the apparatus to abolish slavery. He said, “To dissolve the Union, as a means to abolish slavery, is about as wise as it would be to burn up this city in order to get the thieves out of it.”18 No one could credibly claim that Douglass didn’t understand the issue or wasn’t taking it seriously enough. He had himself been a slave, was separated from his family, and was physically beaten in this demonic institution of slavery, yet Douglass refused to surrender his critical thinking just to appease his partners. This took an incredible amount of fortitude and vision. Remember Douglass the next time your political partners demand that you go along to get along. This man of faith understood that the means of achieving emancipation were not to be overlooked—and history proved him right. Efforts go wrong when people who know better become yes men or women. We hurt the cause most when we fail to be its moral anchor and moral compass.

There is no old age like anxiety,” said one of the monks I met in India. “And there is no freedom from old age like the freedom from anxiety.” In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place. Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. You don’t necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is. “No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens…do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. The idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity. You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. They break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life. The Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water. Your treasure—your perfection—is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. Balinese families are always allowed to eat their own donations to the gods, since the offering is more metaphysical than literal. The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.) To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a walled garden.” The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

During this psychological transformation, the ordinary anchors of everyday life fell away for many working Americans. Family, community, tradition, and certainty were shaken apart by the economic force of the new—urban, postindustrial, and corporate—brand of capitalism. The sense of a person's self, which had previously been socially defined, moved into the interior of each individual's life and mind. Gradually, another concept of the self emerged as capitalism moved into this new stage, and sales or leisured consumption replaced the older emphasis on production and honest, hard work. This transition marked a shift toward a new type of person, one “predicated on the effectiveness of sales technique or the attractiveness of the individual salesperson. Personal magnetism replaced craftsmanship; technique replaced moral integrity.”85 The pervasive anxiety of this era led Americans to look for leadership anywhere they could find it. Three new areas promised relief. First, a new, popular psychology of personality offered to teach Americans how to transform themselves into people with “an intensely private sense of well being.” Self-pleasure and self-satisfaction now became the purpose of individual existence rather than a by-product of a well-lived life, and this ideology conveniently dovetailed with the new consumerism.86 Not surprisingly, then, a second transformative force emerged as the emerging field of advertising co-opted psychology and drafted psychologists like John B. Watson, A. A. Brill, and Sigmund Freud's brilliant nephew Edward Bernays into its well-paying service. On the advice and example of these men, copywriters began to suggest to consumers that they could transform their position in the social and business hierarchy by buying and displaying the correct products and behaviors. The new generation of ads was highly motivational.

Train the consumer to consume temporary fillers. Tell her to collect the tokens that assure her that she has what she needs. Tell her to seek joy in learning that home remedy, buying that decoration, rearranging that schedule, enrolling her kids in that program, or building herself up into the image that she wants to embody. All of those things are easy enough to do if you have enough money, discipline, time, energy, or earthly resources. But there’s a catch: collecting the tokens and living by the lie that your image will give you the peace you crave will only satisfy you for a moment. And then you need another fix. Idols need dusting and maintaining. They always leave you wanting something more, something better, something new, or something your neighbor has. Consuming, we are consumed. When the gods of this world leverage our needs and redirect our hope away from God himself, they indirectly hinder our obedience to the Great Commission. How many missionaries have been held back by consumerism’s short leash? (We can’t afford to go.) How many of our giving budgets have been strangled by consumerism’s shortsighted vision? (We can’t afford to give.) How many of our families have been capped by consumeristic spending forecasts? (We can’t afford to grow.) We need the promises of Jesus to drown out the siren song of consumerism. He’s given missional moms his anchoring promise to hold us fast: “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). Will we trust him more than we trust our stuff?

You need to have a kind of home port where you put down anchor when the hurricane comes; you must stay connected to your roots. That helps you to have humility and an understanding of your true self.

My mother is an extraordinary anchor for me. In this fast-paced and hectic new world, so many people are liberating themselves from their families, putting their loved ones in old people’s homes. This is tragic, to me. Parents and grandparents are a precious commodity. You must not waste them. Make sure your children have time with them. They, too, can gain strength from them.

Our children are the future of our family, our bloodline. And the only hope we can offer them to survive the evil days to come is to introduce Jesus. The hope of a Christian is anchored only in Jesus Christ.

Beatrix kept pace easily with Christopher as they headed toward the forest. It nagged at him to have someone else holding Albert’s leash. Beatrix’s assertiveness was like a pebble lodged in the toe of his shoe. And yet when she was near, it was impossible to feel detached from his surroundings. She had a knack of keeping him anchored in the present. He couldn’t stop watching how her legs and hips moved in those breeches. What was her family thinking, to allow her to dress this way? Even in private it was unacceptable. A humorless smile curved his lips as he reflected that he had at least one thing in common with Beatrix Hathaway--neither of them was in step with the rest of the world. The difference was that he wanted to be. It had been so easy for him, before the war. He had always known the right thing to do or say. Now the prospect of reentering polite society seemed rather like playing a game in which he had forgotten the rules.

There remained only those rare periods of amorousness which still came to them at times but did not last long. These were islets at which they anchored for a while and then again set out upon that ocean of veiled hostility which showed itself in their aloofness from one another. This aloofness might have grieved Ivan Ilych had he considered that it ought not to exist, but he now regarded the position as normal, and even made it the goal at which he aimed in family life. His

We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive. I

So when people ask you where you're from, you won't have a one-word answer for them. Some people, the kind who use cosmopolitan and migrant as insults, will call you rootless. They will call you inauthentic. They will tell you that you lack some important anchor to the earth, that your loves and attachments have less force than theirs because of all the journeys in our family's past. When they say such things, remind yourself that they, too, are migrants, even if they've forgotten it. The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors had sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting. Place is not nothing, and you need to understand that many families have histories that are unlike ours. There is something noble about staying put and building, something worthy of respect. Buy there is also something noble about the nomad who carries a whole world in a suitcase. You were born here in New York, int he middle of a February snowstorm, and so this city will always be yours. Perhaps, if we move again to one of the other places whose names your mother and I have murmured to each other across the kitchen table, you may not grow up thinking of it as home. I'm writing to tell you that you don't need to worry about this. It's not a loss or a lack. Your experience is no more or less authentic or beautiful than a person who lives on land their ancestors have farmed for generations. It is different. You can learn from such people. And they can learn from you.

Don’t let him grow up as I did. Sheltered and clothed and fed and cared for, and yet poorer in human qualities than the poorest of men. A man needs more than food and clothes and money to make him human. He needs love and kindness and affection. He needs people, a family, to give him an anchor, to give him roots in the earth, in society, to teach him the true values in the world. The

Faith is not an anchor; it's a gnawing suspicion that things don’t have to be this way

The art of assembling a well-played home is anchored in truth and authenticity, rigged up with ropes of connection and joy, and set sail by a simple, yet very intentional, shift in perspective. A shift from product to process, good impressions to free expression, perfection to playfulness.

My friend Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, called this idea the theory of “Adjacent Users.” He describes his experience at Instagram, which several years post-launch was growing fast but not at rocketship speed: When I joined Instagram in 2016, the product had over 400 million users, but the growth rate had slowed. We were growing linearly, not exponentially. For many products, that would be viewed as an amazing success, but for a viral social product like Instagram, linear growth doesn’t cut it. Over the next 3 years, the growth team and I discovered why Instagram had slowed, developed a methodology to diagnose our issues, and solved a series of problems that reignited growth and helped us get to over a billion users by the time I left. Our success was anchored on what I now call The Adjacent User Theory. The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and possibly tried using it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them. While Instagram had product-market fit for 400+ million people, we discovered new groups of billions of users who didn’t quite understand Instagram and how it fit into their lives.67 In my conversations with Bangaly on this topic, he described his approach as a systematic evaluation of the network of networks that constituted Instagram. Rather than focusing on the core network of Power Users—the loud and vocal minority that often drive product decisions—instead the approach was to constantly figure out the adjacent set of users whose experience was subpar. There might be multiple sets of nonfunctional adjacent networks at any given time, and it might require different approaches to fix each one. For some networks, it might be the features of the product, like Instagram not having great support for low-end Android apps. Or it might be because of the quality of their networks—if the right content creators or celebrities hadn’t yet arrived. You fix the experience for these users, then ask yourself again, who are the adjacent users? Then repeat. Bangaly describes this approach: When I started at Instagram, the Adjacent User was women 35–45 years old in the US who had a Facebook account but didn’t see the value of Instagram. By the time I left Instagram, the Adjacent User was women in Jakarta, on an older 3G Android phone with a prepaid mobile plan. There were probably 8 different types of Adjacent Users that we solved for in-between those two points. To solve for the needs of the Adjacent User, the Instagram team had to be nimble, focusing first on pulling the audience of US women from the Facebook network. This required the team to build algorithmic recommendations that utilized Facebook profiles and connections, so that Instagram could surface friends and family on the platform—not just influencers. Later on, targeting users in Jakarta and in other developing countries might involve completely different approaches—refining apps for low-end Android phones with low data connections. As the Adjacent User changes, the strategy has to change as well.

He was especially charmed by the two youngest Challons, Ivo and Seraphina, both of them engaging and warm, but also possessing their father's knack for a perfectly timed witticism- a bon mot, Merritt called it. They asked countless questions about Islay, his friends, his dog, and the distillery, and they entertained him with stories of their own. To Keir's relief, neither of them seemed to have difficulty accepting him as a half brother, despite the vast differences in their ages. They had been brought up in an environment filled with so much abundance, it didn't occur to them to feel threatened by anyone. The Challons were nothing like the noble families Keir had heard of, in which the children were raised mostly by servants and seldom saw their parents. These people were close and openly affectionate, with no trace of aristocratic stuffiness. Keir thought that was in no small part due to the duchess, who made no pretense about the fact that her father had made his start as a professional boxer. Evie was the anchor who kept the family from drifting too far in the dizzying altitude of their social position. It was at her insistence that the children had at least a passing acquaintance with ordinary life. For example, it was one of Ivo's chores to wash the dog, and Seraphina sometimes accompanied the cook to market to talk with local tradespeople.

am still that fifteen-year-old girl with my finger down my throat, my stocking-covered knees pressed into the cold bathroom floor, desperately trying to hold on to my family, my mother, my anchor, myself. I never even left that bathroom stall. And now I’m not just stuck in time, but I’m actually tumbling backward, like a pebble ricocheting down a mountainside, out of control, on an unstoppable path to combustion. The floor is falling beneath me, and if I don’t do something now to change my life—to change myself—I’m going to keep falling. I pull up the flights again on my computer, and I purchase a round-trip ticket. I leave in three days.

One thing I appreciate about the liturgical year is that when it becomes a part of your family culture, it can have a stabilizing affect. As life swirls around us, we have the familiarity of the same activities, traditions, smells, sounds, and words to keep us anchored. And what better to be anchored to than the Church (the Bride of Christ) and (as the Bride of Christ) to Christ himself?

It was always a strange thing, coming home. Coming home meant that you had, at one point, left it and, in doing so, irreversibly changed. How odd, then, to be able to return to a place that would always be anchored in your notion of the past. How could this place still be there, if the you that once lived there no longer existed? Yet, at the same time, in complete contradiction, seeing that said place had changed in your absence was nothing if not surreal. Dex felt this as they approached the road leading to their family's farm, just as they felt every time they made the trip. The road was the same, but the fence had been mended. The field was the same, but the greyberry bushes had been cut down to the root. The farm was a place where Dex knew they would always be welcome but never in the same way as before they left; a place they knew intimately and no longer knew at all.

They cut to an interview with my dad, where he went off on Vander Zalm. Ilooked over at him watching. He couldn’t have been happier. I looked back tothe TV.ANCHOR: While many in attendance were obviously disturbed by the disruption...It cut to shots of terrified members of the crowd watching my dad rant like amadman. It then cut to a shot of me, my sister, and my mother, completelyignoring my father. The only ones in the entire crowd not looking in hisdirection.ANCHOR: ...this family somehow managed to be totally unfazed by the outburst

working identity involves revisiting the basic assumptions we use to evaluate possibilities. To illustrate what basic assumptions are, it is useful to think of our career choices as a pyramid with three levels (see figure 4-1).4 At the top of the pyramid lies what is most visible, to us and to the outside world: what job we hold in what setting. Dan, for example, was an executive in a high-tech company. One level below are the values and motivating factors that hold constant from job to job and company to company. These are what MIT career specialist Edgar Schein calls our “career anchors,” the competencies, preferences, and work-related values that we would be unwilling to give up if forced to make a choice.5 Dan’s experience has led him to value himself professionally as someone who excels at turnarounds—at making troubled companies healthy. He could perform this role on a smaller or larger scale (for example, big company or small start-up), in an advisory or a hands-on role, and as a manager or an owner, but the constant is that managerial challenge is what excites him. Dan’s turmoil over the offer of a “perfect job” that would have again robbed him of his family time, however, belies a conflict between his professional and personal values that is rooted at a deeper level. In his search, therefore, he has to plumb deeper: He must explore the final, bottom level of the pyramid to understand the basic assumptions—our mental maps about how the world works—that truly drive his behavior.

The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It is both dynamic and stable—and so must we be. We can’t escape these accelerations. We have to dive into them, take advantage of their energy and flows where possible, move with them, use them to learn faster, design smarter, and collaborate deeper—all so we can build our own eyes to anchor and propel ourselves and our families confidently forward.

It is hard to imagine a more elegant table at which to share a meal. Yet here it sits-never used, never disturbed-accompanied by a single chair. This table harks back to a different era, a better time in the life of Susan's family, when owning this house in this part of Chicago signaled the achievement of middle-class African American respectability. Before the economic anchors of this far South Side neighborhood closed down-the steel yards in the 1960's, the historic Pullman railway car company in the early 1980's, and the mammoth Sherwin-Williams paint factory in 1995-Roseland was a community with decent-paying, stable jobs. It was a good place to raise your kids. As the jobs left, the drugs arrived. 'It got worse, it changed.' Susan says, 'There's too much violence...unnecessary violence at that.' Given what her family has been through, this is more than a bit of an understatement. Susan's brother was shot in broad daylight just one block away. Her great-grandmother has fled to a meager retirement out west. Susan's family would like nothing more than to find a better place to live, safer streets and a home that isn't crumbling around them. Yet despite all its ills, this house is the only thing keeping Susan, Devin, and Lauren off the streets. They have spent the past few months surviving on cash income so low that it adds up to less than $2 per person, per day. With hardly a cent to their names, they have nowhere else to go.

We speak of many things as we go, and I question him about his bills and rent and how he's faring... "I'm okay," he says..."You know what I'm gonna do when I get home right now? I'm gonna sit down with my lady and my two morritos. But well...I don't eat, I just watch them eat...And I just look at 'em and thank God they're in my life...It's a father thing." The duty to delight is to stare at your family as they eat, anchored in the surest kind of gratitude-- the sort that erases sacrifice and hardship and absorbs everything else. Jesus says, "My ways are not your ways," but they sure could be. In the utter simplicity of breathing, we find how naturally inclined we are to delight and to stay dedicated to gladness. We bask in God's unalloyed joy, and we let loose that same joy in whoever is in front of us. We forget what a vital part of our nature this is. (p149-150)

EUREKA! THE OLDEST SPIRITUAL ENTITY IN CREATION IS 42 YEARS AS THE LONGEST SERVING LIVING PERFECT MASTER ON EARTH IS 74 YEARS IN OUR MIDST. THE GOLDEN BIRTH THAT GAVE MEANING TO LIFE In the beginning was The Word, The Word was MAHARAJ JI. On Saturday, December 20, 1947 Maharaj Ji took a Nigerian Body as Satguru Maharaj Ji to dwell among men. This Divine evolutionary process, which occurred in the Gold-mining town of Tutuka, Obuasi, Ghana was heralded by the mid-afternoon Eclipse of the Sun 74 years ago and bore fruits 33 years later in faraway London as the Golden Boy, Mohammed Sahib Akanji Akinbami Ajirobatan Dan Ibrahim, on January 1, 1980 out of Divine Providence, be came the Divine Chosen ONE to carry the baton of Mastership as Satguru Maharaj Ji to save the world from peril. This is in fulfillment of the scriptures as well as prediction of the Sages of Our Time that: i. "For you yourselves to know very well that the Lord will come just like a thief in the night." (Thess 5:2). ii. Dr T. Lobsang Rampa, the famous Tibetan mystic, known for numerous predictions on world issues in one of his books "Chapters of Life" made it clear that at the turn of the millennium, the next Living Perfect Master/World Leader to save the world, whose manifestation would bring the Golden Age of Life. All that is needed is for our brothers and sisters who are facing disasters beyond human control to extend their search, since that is the essence of the Master's manifestation. in. Shri Prempal Singh Rawat's "Peace Bomb" Divine Lecture. He said, "there is no doubt and why should there be any doubt about it? There is a Greater Soul coming Who MOHAMMED SAHIB you will understand better. If you listen to Him, you will be greater than now, Right from the most thickly populated Black Nation in the world, Nigeria, Africa, where civilization started." …. on July 17, 1976 at the University of Pennsylvania, State of Pennsylvania, USA. Since the hen comes first before the egg, the spiritual birth of Satguru Maharaj Ji, The Christ/Mahdi of Our Time on January 1, 1980 could have been a mirage if the physical birth of Mohammed Sahib Akanji Akinbami Ajirobatan Dan Ibrahim did not occur 74 years ago. Come and join the commemorative party that gave meaning to humanity's isolated existence. Today, mankind will neither suffer nor die again. Like the warm embrace between the Sun and Moon that welcome Maharaj Ji's birth, it is profoundly significant for all races to embrace one another as children of the same Almighty Universal Father, MAHARAJ JI. Eureka, the world is saved because The Satguru has successfully and firmly anchored the world on its two feet (Black and White). Happy Celebrations!

Family can be like an anchor. An anchor may tether you. An anchor may also pull and sink your ship.

Be like an anchor, steady, unwavering & holding onto what matters.

Historically, on average international wars have lasted only six months. In contrast, the average civil war has been much longer, with estimates ranging from seven to fifteen years. If a family are going to be refugees for over a decade, their priority is not emergency food and shelter. It is to re-establish the threads of normal famiy life, anchored materially by a capacity of whoever is the breadwinner to earn a living. The camps run by UNHCR met the basic material needs of refugees, but they provided few opportunities to earn a living. Consequently, they left families bereft of autonomy.

Jacques knew, as his body moved gently and lovingly into hers, as his hips thrust forward and he buried himself ever deeper, that his life was changed forever. He would have a home, a family, children; he would have love and laughter surrounding him all the days he chose to remain on earth. He would have her body, her heart, her purity and goodness to temper his predatory nature. His hell had become a paradise that he had somehow, through all his mistakes, managed to reach. Because she could read his mind so easily, because he rarely left her completely, Shea could glimpse his feelings. She laid her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes, and allowed the building explosion to overtake her, Her arms tightened around Jacques, around her anchor, her security. Whatever happened in the future, whatever they were forced to face and deal with, they had one another, and that was all anyone could ask. Jacques lifted them to the heavens, and they soared there together while the water in the pool splashed and receded around them. He framed her face gently with his large hands and looked into her vivid green eyes. “I love you, Shea. I always will,” he vowed softly. “I love you too, Jacques,” she whispered back. He found her mouth, the warm sweetness only she could provide, and took it hungrily. They slipped deeper into their embrace, and the water closed over their heads. Laughing, coughing, they broke apart and swam to the surface, the horrors of the day drowned in the depth of their love.

To their right, a strange fog glowed eerily, streamed through the rain and wound through the trees. It moved forward at knee level coming straight toward them now. Shea felt her heart in her throat. She touched Jacques’ back for reassurance. He stopped, seemingly relaxed, his muscles coiled and ready, like a panther awaiting its moment. She could feel it in him, his readiness, so still and confident. As the fog grew closer, only several yards away now, the moisture began to stack itself higher and higher, the droplets connecting and forming the shape of a man. Shea wanted to scream with fear, but she stayed very still, afraid of distracting Jacques. Byron’s form shimmered for a moment. She could actually see the tree behind the mist, and then he was solid, standing with the curious elegance of the Carpathian male. He lifted his eyes from the ground to meet Jacques’ icy-black gaze. “We have been friends for centuries, Jacques. I cannot remember a time in my life that we did not run together. It is strange and sad to me that you can look at me and not know me.” Shea, behind Jacques, stirred uncomfortably. Byron’s sorrow appeared more than he could bear. She wanted to reach out to him, make an attempt to ease his obvious suffering. Do not! The command was sharp in her mind, clear and in a tone that brooked no argument. Jacques remained motionless, as if carved from stone. Byron’s words did not appear to move him in any way. Byron shrugged, his face twisted with pain. “When we thought you were dead, we searched for your body. Months, years even. You were never out of our thoughts. You were my family, Jacques, my friend. It was hard to learn to be completely solitary. Gregori and Mikhail and even Aidan survived the centuries because, as alone as they had to be, they had a bond, an anchor to keep them strong through the bleak centuries. You were mine. Once you were gone, my struggle became immense.

When we thought you were dead, we searched for your body. Months, years even. You were never out of our thoughts. You were my family, Jacques, my friend. It was hard to learn to be completely solitary. Gregori and Mikhail and even Aidan survived the centuries because, as alone as they had to be, they had a bond, an anchor to keep them strong through the bleak centuries. You were mine. Once you were gone, my struggle became immense.” When Jacques remained silently on guard, Shea pushed at his back. Can’t you hear his grief? He’s reaching out to you. Even if you can’t remember him, help him. You do not know if he has turned or not, Jacques reprimanded her. You felt the presence, and here he is. A vampire can give the illusion of purity, of anything he chooses. Stay behind me! “I just wanted to tell you I am glad you are back, and I am happy for you that you found your lifemate. It was wrong of me to be envious. I should have been more cautious about judging what I did not understand.” Byron raked a hand through his dark hair. “I am going away for a while. I must to gain the strength to get through the years.” Jacques nodded slowly. “I am going to the healer to try to repair the damage done to my mind. I have noticed Gregori’s relationship with Mikhail seems to be strong even though Mikhail has a lifemate. I would wish that if all that you say is true, when I am healed, we can resume our friendship.” The wild winds were dying down. The rain beat down in a steady drone, and the air seemed heavily oppressed. Byron nodded tiredly and managed a wan smile that did not light his eyes. “I wish the best for you both, and I hope that you have many children. Try to make them female for my sake.” “When will you return?” Jacques inquired. “When I am able.” Byron’s form began to waver, to fade, so that they could see through the transparent shape.

I looked up at Josh. His chest rose and fell a little too fast. He had this look on his handsome face—a touch of anxiety, worry, and anticipation around his brow, like he was afraid at any minute all this would be taken from him, like I might suddenly change my mind. I deserved that. This was a shotgun wedding. Josh was the one holding the shotgun. This whole thing was some flash-bang-chaos campaign to hustle me into marriage before I got my bearings. He wanted to lock me down before I freaked out on him and ran. That’s why he’d rushed this. Only, the joke was on him—I wanted to be locked down, and I’d never change my mind. I’d never leave him again. If he wanted this rust bucket of a body so badly, he could have it, and I’d just have to spend the rest of my life making sure he felt secure and loved. I looked at him, my eyes steady, and I took a deep breath. “Joshua, I vow to text you back.” Everyone in the room laughed, my fiancé included, and his face relaxed. I continued. “I will answer every call you make to me for the rest of my life. You’ll never chase me again.” His eyes filled with tears, and he seemed to let go of a breath he’d been holding. “I promise to always go to family day at the station so you know that you’re loved. I vow to support you and follow you anywhere until you’ve found the place that makes you happy. I’ll be your best friend and try and fill that hole in your heart. I’m going to take care of you and cherish you, always and no matter what.” I smiled at him. “I’ll orbit around you and be your universe, because you’ve always been my sun.” He wiped at his eyes, and he had to take a moment before he read his own vows. While I waited, I let his face anchor me. I soaked him in, let his love remind me again and again that I was worth it. He looked at his paper and then seemed to decide he didn’t need it, setting it down on the desk. He gathered up my hands. “Kristen, I vow that no matter what health issues lie ahead, I will love and take care of you. I will show you every day of your life that you’re worth everything. I will carry your worries. All I ask is that you carry your own dog purse.” The room chuckled again. “I promise to love Stuntman Mike and slay your spiders, and keep you from getting hangry.” Now I was laughing through tears. “I will always defend you. I’ll always be on your side.” Then he turned to Sloan. “And I vow to protect and care for you, Sloan, like you’re my sister, for the rest of my life.” This did it. The tears ran down my face, and I was in his arms and weeping before I knew I’d closed the distance. We were both crying. We were all crying, even the witnesses who had no idea how hard the journey had been to get here, the sacrifices that were made for this union. Or who we’d lost along the way.

Spend some time before the mirror, looking into your own eyes. Affirm that you are a radiant child of eternal light. See the beauty, the goodness, the Divine love shining in your own eyes. Remind yourself that you come from God, that you are showered in God’s love, that you share that Divine love with everyone you meet, that you love yourself, and that others love you. Know that you are a blessing to your family and to society. Feel the glow of Divine grace and love in your own heart. Work on the plane of spiritual consciousness as well as on the physical plane. Look into your eyes without blinking and feel the calmness there. Recognize the blessings of God manifesting in your being. Doing this mirror work regularly will make you more beautiful. It will create miracles. You will grow in self-esteem. You will become more aware of your inner strength and power of mind. Divine grace will manifest miracle after miracle around you. You will become your own, true, orienting center. Reading, Day 2   The Universal Journey Our human journey is from lower truth to higher truth, from darkness and ignorance to light and wisdom, from fear of death to deathlessness. It is a journey through the mind, a journey which trains the mind, a journey which always returns the mind to its true, encompassing home in the unifying spirit. We do the basic work of that journey by continuously cultivating our befriending mind, anchoring and re-anchoring ourselves in the ultimate truths of spirit.

As the family unfolded twenty blankets and a picnic barbecue on the riverbank—Washington brought forty-eight bottles of claret to spread good cheer—they watched a macabre sporting event. Two boats, each manned by five or six muscular slaves, raced out to an anchored boat and back, while spectators cheered and placed bets onshore. It was an exceedingly strange vignette: the man who would be fighting for American liberty exactly one year later was being entertained by teams of strong, athletic slaves.

SPIRAL THE ATTRIBUTE In addition to the story of the wedding at Cana, here are some ideas for spiraling back to God’s joy in other parts of the Bible: • Festivals: As God’s people are being reformed, after the exodus, through the law, God tells them to host multiple festivals during the year. These feasts would be community-wide parties that included everyone and anchored the people to God’s joy, abundance, and grace toward them as they retold stories of who God had been for them. • Jesus’ lost-and-found parables point to God’s particular joy when people come back home to God. Bringing them home again is not a project God resents, groveling at the lost state of humanity. It’s a purpose God devotes Themself to and delights in its realization. • If learning Bible verses is part of your family’s web, consider including verses like Nehemiah 8:10: “The joy of [Yahweh] is your strength” (NASB); or Zephaniah 3:17: “For the LORD your God is living among you. [God] is a mighty savior. [God] will take delight in you with gladness. With [Their] love, [God] will calm all your fears. [God] will rejoice over you with joyful songs” (NLT).

When I say that your family needs to weave your own web, this is how you get there. It’s intentional and ordinary. It’s spiritual and also simple. Such is the power of weaving your own web. You get to partner with the Holy Spirit to craft a way of living life that is joyful, sustainable, and anchored to the character of God. Instead of trying to shove your family into a box, you let your web take on the unique shape and structure it needs to help you all know and trust God more and more. All the while, it feels like you, the way that weaving is ordinary for the spider. And ordinary is enough.

Once you’ve come up with a variety of options, it’s time for step two: Narrow to just a few practices. The first criteria for narrowing is anchors. How does this practice help you, your child, and your family collectively anchor to who God is? You might ask: • Why are we doing this practice? • What do I hope this practice forms in us over time? • Do I feel clear about the connection between this idea and one or more aspects of God’s character? If not, could I adjust the practice to strengthen that connection?